Marc Strous

Radboud University Nijmegen

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In the past 10 years Marc Strous has pioneered the field of anaerobic ammonium oxidation (anammox). Anammox is the oxidation of ammonium with nitrite to dinitrogen gas. It is a major biogeochemical process, if not the main source of dinitrogen gas on Earth. It has also been successfully applied in wastewater treatment.

Strous identified the first anammox bacterium 1999, during his PhD studies at Delft University of technology. After obtaining his PhD under supervision of Gijs kuenen, he became a lecturer in Delft and completed a postdoc at the University of New South Wales in the group of Staffan Kjelleberg. After his return he became assistent professor at Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands.

In Nijmegen he started a search for bacteria capable of anaerobic methane oxidation coupled to denitrification. Just like anammox bacteria, denitrifying methanotrophs were considered missing from nature. They were described by Strous and collaborators in 2006.

In 2007, he became part of the Young Academy of Sciences of the netherlands. After becoming a full professor n Nijmegen in 2008, Strous moved to the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology and took up a chair in Bielefeld, Germany. He is currently investigating environmental selection of microbes with a combination of continuous culture, high resolution calorimetry and metagenomics. In Bremen the research still focuses on the nitrogen cycle. In Bielefeld his group aims to deliver a proof of concept for solar methane production at a competitive price.

Abstract: How to search for new microbial activities

Marc Strous, Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology, Bremen, Center for Biotechnology, University of Bielefeld, Germany

Biology generally proceeds from experimental observations. For example, when nitrogen removal from wastewater started in the nineteen seventies, engineers were surprised when biologists explained them that to convert ammonia into nitrogen, they should first oxidize it all the way to nitrate. Direct oxidation of ammonia was impossible – because it had never been observed.

Faced with the astounding microbial biodiversity that lays in front of us, it does no longer make sense to define the possible and the impossible only by what has been observed. I will illustrate this point with the discoveries of two “new” microbial activities: anaerobic ammonium oxidation and methanotrophy coupled to denitrication. Based on these stories I will argue that thermodynamics and metagenomics are two complementary and essential tools to acquire predictive understanding of complex microbial communites.