2026 · update
Won an OSPP award at EGU 2026 for my soil food web presentation
At the EGU General Assembly 2026 in Vienna, my presentation Beyond microbes: mapping soil food web biodiversity via lipid fingerprinting, with Wolfgang Wanek, received an Outstanding Student and PhD candidate Presentation (OSPP) Award.
The starting point: for decades, soil communities have been described with phospholipid fatty acids (PLFA). That method mostly sees bacteria and fungi, and it cannot tell many groups apart. Intact polar lipids keep the head group and the fatty-acid tails together, so each molecule carries much more information about who made it.
We built a reference library of intact polar lipids from organisms across the tree of life: bacteria, archaea, fungi, protists, plants and soil animals. Using UPLC with dual-polarity Orbitrap MS/MS and molecular networking, we captured more than 140,000 molecular features, grouped into about 10,000 molecular families, from around 30 phyla and over 50 lipid classes.
Each phylum showed its own lipid make-up, including clear fingerprints for nematodes, arthropods, molluscs and amoebae, which older methods largely miss. As a first test, we found these signatures in real soil samples. The next step is to validate the candidate biomarker families more widely, so lipids can map whole soil food webs, not just their microbes.
Abstract (EGU26-10003)
2026 · update
New ISME Journal paper: cow rumen microbes and a plant sulfur sugar
Plants and algae build a sulfur-containing lipid, SQDG, into their photosynthetic membranes. Its sugar head, sulfoquinovose, is made in huge amounts across the planet, and the bacteria that break it down are part of the global sulfur cycle. Yet we know little about who these bacteria are in nature.
In this study, led by J. Krasenbrink, the team developed a gene-based test that targets yihQ, the enzyme that frees sulfoquinovose from the lipid. It showed a far richer community of sulfoquinovose degraders in the cow rumen than in human or mouse guts.
In rumen-fluid experiments, the microbes broke sulfoquinovose down to sulfide by working together: some turned it into isethionate, and another bacterium most likely used that for respiration. Several of the bacteria involved had never been described before.
I'm one of the co-authors. The work connects to the sulfolipids card in my research: the same plant lipids that feed rumen microbes also turn up in soils.
Paper in The ISME Journal
2025 · update
First-author paper: lipids reveal soil life and climate stress
Soil is home to archaea, bacteria, fungi, protists, plants and animals, and together they cycle nutrients and store carbon. Methods based on genes or fatty acids often miss part of this community, or say little about how much of each group is there.
In this paper we present a high-resolution lipidomics workflow made for soils: lipid extraction, liquid chromatography with Orbitrap mass spectrometry, strict quality control, and annotation in several tiers. We also built a model that predicts how strongly each lipid ionizes, a step towards measuring lipids without needing a standard for every one.
The workflow detected 17,679 lipid features and annotated 4,921 lipid compounds, far more than conventional methods. The lipid profiles separate bacteria, fungi, plants and algae. In soils exposed to simulated future climate and drought, membrane and storage lipids shifted in subtle but ecologically meaningful ways.
Written with E. Salas, L. Fuchslueger, H. Schmidt, M. Gorfer, M. Schagerl, S. Eichorst and W. Wanek. The paper is open access.
Paper in Soil Biology and Biochemistry