MICROBE Consortium – Biodiversity Exploratories

Goals

The common goal of MICROBE and the DFG priority program “Biodiversity Exploratories” is to determine microbial diversity in soils. So far, the exploratories have primarily used molecular methods to characterize the structure and function of the soil microbiome. Within the framework of the EU project MICROBE, the corresponding key microorganisms are now to be isolated and cultivated in order to store them in strain collections (e.g. DSMZ) and make them available to the general public.

Methods

Data will be collected on the following parameters:

Isolation of key microorganisms from soil samples taken as part of the General Soil Sampling Campaign.
Isolation of nucleic acids (gDNA and RNA) to study the storage stability of the samples.
The definition of the corresponding key organisms is based on the molecular barcoding data for bacteria and fungi from 2006 ff.

Cooperations are projects financed by the cooperation partners’ own funds and thus financially independent of the DFG-funded infrastructure priority program ‟Biodiversity Exploratories (BE)”. They complement the BE with further interesting research content on biodiversity research and in return benefit from the infrastructure of the Biodiversity Exploratories.