☎ +43 1 4277 91206
✉ jillian.petersen(at)univie.ac.at
» CV
» u:cris
» u:find
Animals and plants evolved in a “sea” of microbes. It is therefore not surprising that the vast majority have evolved to rely on microbes for aspects of their health, development, nutrition, and productivity. Jillian Petersen’s group contributes to this rapidly expanding research field. Her work focuses on beneficial interactions between marine invertebrate animals and their sulfur-oxidising bacterial symbionts, as well as marine and terrestrial plant-microbe interactions. The goal is to understand how the symbiotic partners establish and maintain their intimate relationship from generation to generation, and how these associations evolved in such diverse and widespread habitats, from deep-sea hydrothermal vents to shallow water seagrass beds.
Jillian and her group use the full suite of methods for understanding diversity and function of uncultured microbes in natural habitats, including high-throughput sequencing, single-cell imaging, and isotope tracing, among many others. She has received an ERC Starting Grant in 2018, an ERC Consolidator Grant in 2023, is a Board Member for the FWF, and Editor-in-Chief of the ISME Journal.
We investigate host-microbe mutualisms in diverse host animal groups, but our main experimental models are lucind clams that host a specific species of sulfur-oxidizing bacteria in their gill cells. Lucinid clams are found worldwide in shallow marine habitats such as coastal seagrass sediments that are easily accessible for sampling. There are hundreds of species of lucinids currently known, and almost every one of these hosts its own specific symbiotic microbes. The symbiotic bacteria are chemosynthetic, which means they use chemical energy from the environment to synthesize sugars and other molecules needed by the host. This ancient and highly successful partnership has resulted in a reduction of the length and complexity of the clam’s digestive tract over evolution, as it relies on its gill symbionts for nutrition.
Sea- and saltmarsh grasses thrive along most of Earth’s coastlines. They form the basis for some of the most ecologically and economically valuable…
Virtually every animal on Earth evolved with and among trillions of microbes in the environment. Interactions with these microbes are mostly invisible…
BiOcean5D is a major interdisciplinary project designed to better understand the impact of human activity on Europe's seas and coastlines.
Alcaraz CM, Séneca J, Kunert M, Pree C, Sudo M, Petersen JM. Sulfur-oxidizing symbionts colonize the digestive tract of their lucinid hosts. ISME Journal. 2024 Oct 10;18(1):wrae200. doi: 10.1093/ismejo/wrae200
Sudo M, Osvatic J, Taylor JD, Dufour SC, Prathep A, Wilkins LGE et al. SoxY gene family expansion underpins adaptation to diverse hosts and environments in symbiotic sulfide oxidizers. mSystems. 2024 Jun;9(6):e01135-23. Epub 2024 May 15. doi: 10.1128/msystems.01135-23
Morel-Letelier I, Yuen B, Kück AC, Camacho-García YE, Petersen JM, Lara M et al. Adaptations to nitrogen availability drive ecological divergence of chemosynthetic symbionts. PLoS Genetics. 2024 May 31;20(5):e1011295. doi: 10.1371/journal.pgen.1011295
Osvatic JT, Yuen B, Kunert M, Wilkins L, Hausmann B, Girguis P et al. Gene loss and symbiont switching during adaptation to the deep sea in a globally distributed symbiosis. ISME Journal. 2023 Mar;17(3):453-466. Epub 2023 Jan 13. doi: 10.1038/s41396-022-01355-z
Amorim K, Loick-Wilde N, Yuen B, Osvatic JT, Waege-Recchioni J, Hausmann B et al. Chemoautotrophy, symbiosis and sedimented diatoms support high biomass of benthic molluscs in the Namibian shelf. Scientific Reports. 2022 Dec 1;12(1):9731. Epub 2022 Jun 13. doi: 10.1038/s41598-022-13571-w
Jillian Petersen is part of the FWF-funded Cluster of Excellence (CoE)
