Hannah Kleyer

I am a microbiologist with special interests in bacterial communities and their roles in biodiversity-ecosystem functioning. With my PhD project, I am aiming to get a better understanding on how soils promote high diversity of numerous different bacterial species inhibiting a shared environment. It is a longstanding challenge how heterogeneity and spatial structures in soils contribute to maintain numerous different species to coexist. Together with a team of soil-physicists I'm currently testing different hypothesis with microcosm experiments to mimic a soil-like porous environment. Therefor I adopted a porous surface model (ref.) to systematically induce fluctuations in hydration conditions that alter aqueous phase connectivity and nutrient diffusion pathways to evaluate their effects on species composition and community functioning.

To quantify activity and dynamics in composition of a synthetic bacterial community (comprising of 11 well-defined species), I am currently implementing a microfluidic real-time PCR assay in our laboratory allowing fast absolute quantification of community composition and bacterial abundance at species-level. For more details see Microbial life in porous media