Adrian-Stefan Andrei, Ph.D.

Contact details

Phone: 387775819
Web: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=cveROlIAAAAJ&hl=en
E-mail: adrian.stefan.andrei@bc.cas.cz
Room: 22

Others

Description:

My research interests revolve around microbial ecology and biogeography. By making use of ecogenomics-based approaches, I am interested in exploring the basal foliage of the phylogenomic tree of life and unveiling the links between ecological and chemical diversity in aquatic ecosystems.

As life allegedly arose in aquatic environments more than 3.4 Ga ago and rapidly reached remarkable levels of metabolic sophistication, it freed itself from the anaerobiosis chains and triggered a series of events that culminated with the dawn of the Great Oxygenation Event. As aquatic environments represent Terra’s lifeblood and cover more than 70% of its surface (comprising its largest ecosystems and storing a substantial part of its biomass), the microorganisms harbored by them are of crucial importance for the sustainability and habitability of our planet, and represent the foundation of life as we know it. So far, despite their critical significance, little is known about the great extent of aquatic microbial diversity and its metabolic complexity. Furthermore, the vast majority of aquatic microorganisms cannot be axenically cultured and described under standard laboratory conditions, making their ecological functions and interactions largely uncharted. The ‘omics’-based approaches and sequencing technologies have revolutionized our way to scrutinize the microbial world and provided powerful tools to survey whole microbial communities, including their metabolic potential, evolutionary history, phylogeny and biogeography. In our technology-driven exploration of the microbial world, my (current) work seeks to make use of culture-free deep-sequencing and bioinformatics in order to shed light on the viral components of freshwater habitats and their elusive prokaryotic hosts.

Research gate profile: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Stefan_Andrei6