Ulrich Dirks
Position: Ph.D. student
Member of the graduate school "Symbiotic Interactions"
Ph.D. thesis
Within the framework of the ASF project #20394 - A marine flatworm/chemoautotrophic bacteria symbiosis I am investigating the symbiosis between Paracatenula flatworms and their chemoautotrophic bacterial symbionts. In the project I am working on we are interested in phylogeny, biogeography and the ecology of host and symbiont. Additionally my focus lies on symbiont transmission, trophic interactions between host and symbiont and the flatworms neoblast system.
Contact
email: ulrich.dirks@univie.ac.at
phone: +43/1/4277/57104
Publications
Harald Ronald Gruber-Vodicka, Ulrich Dirks, Nikolaus Leisch, Christian Baranyi, Kilian Stoecker, Silvia Bulgheresi, Niels Robert Heindl, Matthias Horn, Christian Lott, Alexander Loy, Michael Wagner, and Jörg Ott. Paracatenula, an ancient symbiosis between thiotrophic Alphaproteobacteria and catenulid flatworms. PNAS 2011
published ahead of print June 27, 2011, doi:10.1073/pnas.1105347108 - online here
Bulgheresi S.*, Gruber-Vodicka HR*, Heindl NR, Dirks U, Kostadinova M, Breiteneder H and Ott JA. 2011. Sequence variability of the pattern recognition receptor Mermaid mediates specificity of marine nematode symbioses. ISME Journal 5, 986–998 - online here
*these authors contributed equally
Academic career
2001-2007 Biological studies at the University of Düsseldorf, Germany
2007 Diploma thesis in molecular and developmental biology
Since 2007 Ph.D. student at the Department of Marine Biology at the University of Vienna
Research activities and training courses attended
2005 Laboratory internship at the Max Planck institute for marine Microbiology in Bremen
2007 Assistant at the HYDRA Institute for Marine Science on Elba, Italy
Talks
2009 "Paracatenula spec. - a mouthless flatworm with endosymbiotic bacteria" International Symposium on Flatworm Biology July 2009, Diepenbeek (Belgium)
2010 "Paracatenula – a mouthless flatworm with endosymbiotic bacteria"
presented at the Science day at the VIENNA ECOLOGY CENTRE, Vienna, Austria
Poster Presentations
2008 A NOVEL MARINE FLATWORM/THIOTROPHICBACTERIA SYMBIOSIS MODEL SYSTEM. ISME 12, Cairns, Australia
Skills
molecular lab work with special focus on whole mount immunofluorescence (IF) and in situ hybridisation stainings (ISH), scuba diving