Dr. Daan Speth

Recent advances in sequencing technologies have dramatically altered our view of microbial diversity, and led to major discoveries of novel organisms involved in the carbon and nitrogen cycles. During his PhD at Radboud University (Netherlands), Daan applied metagenomics and other sequence-based bioinformatics to study microbial communities in wastewater and marine environments, with a focus on nitrogen and carbon transformations. He continued this work at Caltech (USA) and the Max Plank Institute of Marine Microbiology (Germany), and additionally became fascinated by the evolutionary history and diversity of protein families essential for anaerobic microorganisms. Since 2023, he has continued working on nitrogen cycling organisms as well as protein evolution at the University of Vienna.

The genomic era has generated millions of genomes of Bacteria and Archaea, belonging to over 300,000 species. For more than 85% of those species, the only information we have is their genome sequence. Interpreting the physiology and ecology of these organisms is a major challenge in microbiology. I tackle this challenge using data-driven physiology. Combining and integrating global scale data sources to prioritize protein complexes for experimental characterization. The current focus of this approach are molybdoenzymes of the Mo/W bis PGD superfamily. These protein complexes catalyze a wide range of biochemical reactions, and are involved in the biogeochemical cycles of carbon, nitrogen, sulfur, iodine, selenium, and arsenic.