The Bremen professor for Microbial Symbioses, Nicole Dubilier, has been awarded the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize for her work on symbioses between micro-organisms and  marine animals. This is the most coveted and highly endowed German research prize, Nicole Dubilier is the Director of the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in Bremen, where she leads the symbiosis department. The marine researcher teaches in the Faculty of Biology / Chemistry at the University of Bremen. In addition to this, she is also a project leader at the University of Bremen's Center for Marine Environmental Sciences (MARUM).

Her research focus is on symbiosis, which involves investigating processes of ecological and evolutionary adaptation between bacteria and marine invertebrates. She finds the objects of her research in the vicinity of hydrothermal vents in the deep-sea oceans, which are reached on special expedition voyages. Such organisms can also be found in more easily accessible fields of sea grass and in the sulfide-rich sediments of coastal waters. What all these different habitats have in common is the scarce availability of sources of energy and nutrients – which is why the host organisms are dependent on the organic carbon compounds produced by their bacterial symbionts in the course of chemosynthesis. “The discovery of living populations of mussels, worms and shrimps in the deep sea 35 years ago was quite sensational. We now know that the life basis for these populations is formed by the symbiosis between bacteria and their animal hosts”, Dubilier explains. The Bremen researcher has opened up new insights into the dependence of symbiotic life and how marine organisms source energy. ?

After undergraduate studies and obtaining her doctorate in Biology, in 1992 Nicole Dubilier worked as a post-doc in Harvard. After this, she moved to the Max Planck Institute (MPI) for Marine Microbiology in Bremen and was a visiting professor in Paris. She was made a Director of the Bremen MPI in September 2013, after starting to teach in the Faculty of Biology / Chemistry at the University of Bremen in 2012. In 2013 she was also awarded an ERC Advanced Grant.

You can obtain more information by contacting:
The Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology
Prof.Dr. Nicole Dubilier
Phone: +49 421 2028-932
email: ndubilieprotect me ?!mpi-bremenprotect me ?!.de
www.mpi-bremen.de/Nicole_Dubilier.html