Chris Rinke

Background

About Chris Rinke

My main interests include the phylogeny, taxonomy and ecology of free living and symbiotic Bacteria and Archaea. My team focuses on the majority of microbes which elude current culturing efforts. This so-called "Microbial Dark Matter" can only be explored with culture-independent approaches, and I have pioneered methods in high throughput single-cell genomics, the separation and sequencing of single bacterial and archaeal cells, and metagenomics, the direct sequencing of DNA from environmental samples. Currently, my team uses a range of "omics" techniques to study the phylogenetic and metabolic diversity of Microbial Dark Matter, to investigate bacterial plastic degradation (including the gut microbiomes of polystyrene eating superworms), to describe microbial and viral communities in coastal waterways, explore microbial compositions in deep-sea subsurface sediments, characterise insect microbiomes, and to identify the main microbial players in terrestrial hot springs. I am a founding member of the Genome Taxonomy Database (GTBD; gtdb.ecogenomic.org), and active in the GTDB curation team. GTDB is an initiative to establish a standardised archaeal and bacterial taxonomy based on genome phylogeny. Find me on Twitter @ChristianRinke