Fate of Pollutants

The knowledge of the fate of pollutants forms the basis for assessing negative environmental impacts and developing solutions for them.

One focus of our research group is on the environmental fate of various pollutants (e.g., antibiotics, flame retardants, heavy metals, nanoplastics). On the one hand, we investigate the degradation and the transformation by natural societies of bacteria and fungi; On the other hand, we use these microbial communities in a targeted manner to make harmful substances more harmless. We use state-of-the-art techniques such as Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) or flow cytometry.