Microbial Dark Matter

ARC Future Fellow, Australian Centre for Ecogenomics (ACE), SCMB, University of Queensland, Australia.

Chris received his PhD in Zoology from the Marine Biology Department at the University of Vienna, Austria and has since shifted his focus to the microbial world. His research interests include the phylogeny and ecology of the uncultured majority of Archaea and Bacteria which eluded culturing efforts and are known as “Microbial Dark Matter”.
To explore this Microbial dark Matter, Chris pioneered methods in high throughput microbial single-cell genomics, the separation and sequencing of single bacterial and archaeal cells, and metagenomics, the direct sequencing of DNA from environmental samples. His lab uses a range of "omics" techniques to learn more about the phylogenetic and metabolic diversity encoded in microbial dark matter taxa.