dr. SA (Stefan) Geisen

Research

I am a molecular ecologist who focuses on the interactions of microbiome predators (protists and nematodes) with their bacterial and fungal prey. I want understand the functional implication of these interactions such as on the performance of plants, greenhouse gas emissions and other soil functions.

I am generally also interested in understanding the drivers of microbiome predator communities in soils and the resulting change in their function. For that, I am optimizing techniques to better study these organisms particularly focusing on metabarcoding (high-throughput amplicon sequencing) but also other techniques to estimate their abundances and biomasses.

Also other soil organisms are in the scope of my research to eventually get a more complete understanding of the biodiversity in soils.

Research group:

• Alejandro Berlinches de Gea
• Robbert van Himbeeck
• Shunran Hu
• Guixin Li
• Arne Schwelm
• Joliese Teunissen
• Yuxin Wang
• Rutger Wilschut