Recent and selected past events

Mar 9-11, Roland at Mountain West Microbiome Alliance Meeting, Snowbird, UT

​Apr 22, World premiere of docu-music film Yellowstone Wild Through Time at the Museum of the Rockies. Roland served as scientific advisor for the film, which was made by award-winning director Carol Amore.   Watch the trailer

Jun 3-7, Jacob at ASM Health meeting, Washington DC

Jun 28-Jul 3, Joelie, Nicole, and Roland at GRC C1 Metabolism conference, Waterville, NH

Jul 6-10, Stavros at EMBO Workshop on the Molecular Biology of Archaea, Cambridge, UK; Roland attends virtually

Aug  16-20, Joelie, Nicole, Roland, and Zack at 20th International Symposium on Microbial Ecology, Auckland, NZ

​Oct 27-31, Anthony at Microbiome meeting, Cold Spring Harbor, NY

Nov 30, Sylvia defends her PhD

Upcoming events

​If you are a highly motivated prospective grad student or postdoc candidate, please contact Roland by email. Prospective graduate students interested in environmental microbiology or astrobiologycan can join us

via the Chem-Biochem, Microbiology and Cell Biology, or the Molecular BioSciences Program.

Jun 11, New paper by Will in Microbiology Spectrum: Proteomic stress response by a novel methanogen enriched from the Great Salt Lake. In this study, Will enriched a novel methanogen, for which we propose the name Candidatus Methanohalophilus hillemani, from the GSL at a time when its salinity reached a historical high. 




May 22, New paper by Sylvia and Andy in ISME Communications: Tracking active heterotrophic microbial communities in the Guaymas Basin deep biosphere. Our results revealed a heterotrophic microbial population throughout all marine sediments examined, with heterotrophic taxa translationally active down to our deepest sampling point, 154 meters below the seafloor. PDF




Congrats to Nicole for passing her qualifying exam with flying colors!




Oct 16 2025, New paper by Zack Jay et al: Ecology of methyl coenzyme M reductase encoding Thermoproteota. We demonstrate that MCR-encoding Thermoproteota are widely distributed in diverse anoxic ecosystems and express mcrA mRNA!   PDF




Dec 12 2025, New paper in Science Advances: Cultivation of Methanonezhaarchaeia, the 3rd class of methanogens in the Thermoproteota! Anthony and Sylvia cultured and characterized Methanonezhaarchaeia, the 3rd class of methanogens within Thermoproteota   PDF




Oct 16 2025, Joelie's and Grayson's archaeal CloneFISH paper is accepted at Microbiology Resource Announcements! We present a collection of 30 E. coli cultures each carrying a plasmid for the heterologous expression of a (near) full-length 16S rRNA gene from one of 30 lineages of archaea, including 17 yet uncultured ones.


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Sep 26 2025, New article A roadmap for equitable reuse of public microbiome data is published in Nature Microbiology.   PDF

 





Jul 10 2025, Congrats to Joelie for receiving a NSF ERFP, which will fund her work on Methanosuratincola in diverse anoxic ecosystems.​




Jun 13 2025, Nicole receives NSF GRFP!​ She will work on our Methanosuratincola culture and methanogens in Puerto Rican mangroves




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​Hatzenpichler ​Environmental Microbiology Lab​​​

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99% of microbes currently cannot be grown in the lab. We seek to understand what this "uncultured majority" is doing and how its activity shapes Earth's biogeochemical cycles ​and life on our planet.​