Welcome šŸ‘‹

We are a lab led by Christian Diener at the Medical University of Graz in the Diagnostic and Research Institute of Hygiene, Microbiology and Environmental Medicine. Our lab studies the human gut microbiome through an approach that combines ecology, systems biology, and metabolism. We are also big fans of equitable and accessible Science and participate in various efforts to share our research, software, and teaching materials.

Like us, microbes rarely live alone and may behave quite differently when around others or in a new environment. We are interested in the complex metabolic interactions taking place between microbes, the host, and their environment, and how those can be leveraged to understand and design complex microbial communities. We mainly use computational strategies but also run experiments in our wetlab.

The lab forms part of the Austrian FWF Cluster of Excellence Microbiomes Drive Planetary Health and collaborates with other researchers and industry all across the globe. If you are interested in learning more feel free to check out our team, lab values, research areas, and publications.

Latest publication

Phenotypic heterogeneity in the human gut microbiome revealed by subspecies-resolution single-cell transcriptomics

preprint

Most of our knowledge about bacterial functional roles in microbiomes comes from bulk measurements. Yet microbial communities are complex ecosystems in which functionally distinct bacterial subpopulations with unique transcriptional states emerge across environmental niches and from interactions with other community members. Such heterogeneous transcriptional states are inherently missed by bulk measurements. To address this gap, we developed multispecies microbial split-pool ligation meta-transcriptomics (metaSPLiT), a scalable, instrument-free single-cell RNA sequencing approach for the microbiome. Using metaSPLiT, we profiled healthy human fecal microbiomes and reconstructed 21,598 single cell transcriptomes belonging to 70 unique bacterial species.

Latest post

Course Announcement: Strain-level metabolic modeling of microbial communities

course registration metabolic modeling

The following couse will be offered within the Theodor Escherich Symposium 2026 in Graz, Austria.

Please Register Here

The course is limited to 30 participants and will be free of charge.

What is this about?

Just like us, microbes rarely live alone, instead living in large microbial communities consisting of up to thousands of different strains that interact with each other and their environment. The functional repertoire of species is encoded by their specific genome; however, how they will interact with other strains and their environment cannot be deduced from genomic sequences alone.