Our mission is to teach Microbiology and Immunology at all levels, to perform cutting edge research and to promote Microbiology and Immunology by collaborative interactions with local and international partners.
Researchers at ETH Zurich have engineered bacteria in the laboratory to efficiently use methanol. The metabolism of these bacteria can now be tapped into to produce valuable products currently made by the chemical industry from fossil fuels.
The publication in Science by the Piel group (IMB) in collaboration with the Piechulla (University of Rostock) and Walker group (Vanderbilt University) reports a method that permits the construction of tailored bacterial biosynthetic pathways for structurally complex polyketide metabolites, based on ways how modular megaenzymes evolve naturally.
To study the dynamics of microbiome assembly with strain-level resolution, the Vorholt, Hardt, and Sunagawa labs (all IMB) jointly developed a novel genomic barcoding system, the WISH-tags. These were used to assess how the order of arrival order impacts colonization in plant and mammalian microbiomes.
