Cluster of Excellence "The Future Ocean"
The ocean. It covers more than two thirds of our planet. Even so, we know more about the surface of the moon than about the depths of the seas. This, in spite of the fact that mankind's future lies in the world's seas. They determine the climate of tomorrow across the entire globe – and are already suffering from the advance of global warming. New raw materials and sources of energy can be found on the seafloor – how can we exploit them? Many marine organisms may harbour the secrets to cures for diseases – if they are still around tomorrow. These are just some of the facets that the Kiel cluster "The Future Ocean" is investigating.
The
Bosch lab is involved in research area B2: Marine Medicine:
Interactions between complex barriers and microbiota in the Ocean.
Boundaries (barriers) protect the human body from the environment. So-called barrier organs like the mouth, lungs, skin and intestines protect humans internally from penetration by harmful substances that may occur in the air or food. Biological barriers, which originated in simple marine organisms, are vital to human health. Inflammatory diseases are the result of this boundary no longer functioning properly.
Understanding the evolution of genes responsible for human diseases affecting biological barriers in large part relies on the study of phylogenetically old organisms. The primary objective of our research with the Cluster “The future Ocean” is to understand human barrier disorders by dissecting phylogenetically ancient molecular mechanisms of marine host /microbial interactions which have evolved in the marine environment in the last million years. Marine cnidarians have become attractive model organisms for these studies.
One of the most common and widely distributed species is the jelly fish Aurelia. Based on our success in stably transforming stem cells in the freshwater polyp Hydra (Wittlieb et al., PNAS 2006), we currently develop an efficient method to generate transgenic jellyfish (Aurelia aurita) by embryo microinjection. We also are engaged in a multidisciplinary project to analyze the specifically associated microbial consortium on the Aurelia tissue by a pyrosequencing approach.