How to eat without a mouth or gut: nutritional symbioses between chemosynthetic bacteria and gutless marine worms

Marine worms without a mouth or gut were first discovered over 35 years ago in coral reef sands, but the mystery of how they gain their nutrition was not solved until large communities of gutless invertebrates were discovered in 1977 at hydrothermal vents in the deep sea. We now know that these animals gain their nutrition from chemosynthetic bacteria that fix carbon dioxide into organic compounds, as in photosynthesis, but using reduced compounds such as sulfide or methane as energy sources instead of sunlight. Chemosynthetic symbioses occur worldwide and have evolved multiple times from numerous bacterial lineages and at least 9 animal groups (Dubilier et al. 2008. Nature Rev Microbiol). In my talk, I will present an overview of the research in my lab on these symbioses and describe how new tools that range from in situ instruments for measuring environmental parameters to lab-based methods such as ‚omics‘ and single cell imaging, provide the opportunity to understand symbiotic associations in their environmental and ecological context.
Professor Dr. Nicole Dubilier is the director of the symbiosis department at the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology (MPI-MM) in Bremen, Germany and a professor at the University of Bremen. She gained her PhD in marine zoology from the University of Hamburg followed by a two year postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University in the USA. She has been at the MPI-MM since 1997 where her research group studies the diversity, ecology, and evolution of symbioses between chemosynthetic bacteria and marine invertebrates. Nicole Dubilier recently received an ERC Advanced Grant and the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize of the DFG.
Moderation: Professor Dr. Thomas Schweder