Harald Gruber-Vodicka

Harald Gruber-Vodicka is Heisenberg-Professor at Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel and heads the Gruber-Vodicka Lab – Marine Symbioses at the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in Bremen. His group combines organismal biology, molecular ecology, evolutionary biology and bioinformatics to unravel how marine animals establish and maintain intracellular symbioses with bacteria.

Education & Career:

• Heisenberg-Professorship (DFG) – CAU Kiel, Germany.
• Research Group Leader – Department of Symbiosis, Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology, Bremen.

Research Interests:
His research focuses on three major model systems:

• Paracatenula flatworms: the oldest extant animal–bacteria symbiosis with chemosynthetic Ca. Riegeria symbionts that possess drastically reduced genomes and serve as primary energy-storage organelles.
• Placozoans (Trichoplax): simplest animals harbouring two distinct intracellular bacteria, including a newly discovered bacterial phylum found in animals after five decades.
• Kentrophoros ciliates: associations with gammaproteobacterial “Kentron” symbionts that function as chemolithoheterotrophs rather than autotrophs.

Across these systems, he dissects host–symbiont fidelity, reductive genome evolution, metabolic integration and the development of bioinformatics tools for metagenomic analyses.

Scientific Awards:

• German Research Foundation (DFG) Heisenberg-Professorship.

Labs & Teams:
Gruber-Vodicka leads the Marine Symbioses group with ~10–15 members including post-docs, PhD students and technicians. The lab is fully equipped for molecular biology, fluorescence microscopy, high-throughput sequencing and houses live cultures of Paracatenula and Trichoplax.

Software & Resources:
He has developed widely-used open-source tools:

• phyloFlash – rapid SSU rRNA profiling and targeted assembly from Illumina datasets.
• gbtools – interactive visualization of metagenome bins in R.