International Research Stay in the Gleixner group at the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry

From June/December 2024, I visited the Molecular Biogeochemistry group of apl. Prof. Gerd Gleixner at the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry as part of a grant 2024/02443-1 to conduct the project titled “Trees, microbes, and molecules: Understanding the role of tree biodiversity in the microbial carbon fluxes of Amazonian agroforest soils”. I spent six fantastic months in Jena/Germany, and I had the opportunity to learn a lot from Prof. Gleixner and his group. Special thanks to his Amazing PhD students, Jessica Fink, Frederik Lange, Arina Ivanova, and Alice Orne, for their friendship and mentorship.

Prof. Gleixner’s group is currently doing Amazing research into the carbon dynamic and molecular composition of the Amazon Rainforest Critical Zone. During those months, I’ve had the opportunity to employ advanced mass spectrometry techniques to unravel the molecular composition of the soil-dissolved organic matter (DOM) from tropical agroforests in the Amazon ecosystem. Together, we will couple the metabolomics data with the microbial community data to create new models of the plant-soil-microbe interactions in these environments.