Main areas of my research:
Describing novel taxa: Automated system for description of novel taxa
A large portion of the gut microbiome remains uncultured, termed the "dark matter". I have contributed to the valid naming of >100 bacterial species. To help others, I have produced Protologger, a tool designed to simplify the process of describing novel taxa. Protologger provides multiple lines of evidence for taxonomic placement as well as functional profiling and the ecological occurrence of the input novel taxa. Protologger can now be installed locally via Conda or used via the website; protologger.de
Functional ecology: What do lipolytic species do?
A main focus of my work is on the functional role of each species and how they contribute to host phenotypes. Over the last few years I have been working to identify which bacterial species contain and express lipases and how they contribute to