Welcome 👋

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

Metagenomic estimation of dietary intake from human stool

Dietary intake is tightly coupled to gut microbiota composition, human metabolism and the incidence of virtually all major chronic diseases. Dietary and nutrient intake are usually assessed using self-reporting methods, including dietary questionnaires and food records, which suffer from reporting biases and require strong compliance from study participants. Here, we present Metagenomic Estimation of Dietary Intake (MEDI): a method for quantifying food-derived DNA in human faecal metagenomes. We show that DNA-containing food components can be reliably detected in stool-derived metagenomic data, even when present at low abundances (more than ten reads).
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Latest post

Open PhD position: Designing the niche space of the human gut microbiome

position open phd
Deadline: March 21st, 2025 - apply here Virtually every surface of our planet is colonized by microbes and the human body is no exception. The 38 trillion microbes living in our gut metabolize a large fraction of the dietary metabolites, pharmaceutical drugs, and xenobiotics we consume and thus provide an important interface between the environment and our blood stream. Whereas many of the species forming the human gut microbiome have been well-characterized by now, we still know very little about the factors that determine which microbial species can coexist in any given individual.
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