Main Content
Martina Preiner
Our group wants to understand how life arose in an environment of rocks and water 4 billion years ago. To that end, we experimentally connect central metabolic cofactors and enzymatic reactions to early Earth geochemical reaction partners with a focus on CO2-fixation. Ultimately, our goal is to understand the transition from environmental reactions to genetically encoded metabolic functions. In the M4C initiative, we are interested in how the key molecules of metabolic pathways were selected in early chemical evolution and close the gaps between geo- and biochemistry to open the doors to new, unseen approaches to directly connect cells/microbes with their environment and develop novel bio/geochemical CO2-transformations.
Research Focus:
Microbes as Drivers; Microbes providing Solutions
Key Publication(s):
Preiner M, Igarashi K, Muchowska KB, Yu M, Varma SJ, Kleinermanns K, Nobu MK, Kamagata Y, Tüysüz H, Moran J, *Martin WF. A hydrogen-dependent geochemical analogue of primordial carbon and energy metabolism. Nature Ecology and Evolution 2020 4:534-542. doi: 10.1038/s41559-020-1125-6.
