M.J. Echeveste Medrano (Maider)

We have evidence of coastal/estuarine ecosystems becoming hotspots of a very a potent greenhouse gas: methane. Bridging freshwater with seawater bodies, these dynamic and unique natural ecosystems are anthropogenically sensitive. Upstream, agricultural/sewage runoff induced eutrophication can lead to increase anoxic conditions while increasing both methane and sulfide production. Downstream, climate change-derived sea level rise can introduce salt to freshwater habitats.

I am very curious to get to know how microbial communities change and physiologically respond to present/future coastal ecosystem challenges. Some coastal stressors that I focus on are: differential substrate (nitrogen and sulfide) loading effects, salt intrusion (osmotic stress) or, sulfide toxicity. I employ enrichments that derived from coastal anoxic sediments or, anaerobic methane oxidizing archaeal cultures of Ca. Methanoperedens.

For my work, I mainly rely on bioreactor cultivation, metagenomics/transcriptomics, 16S rRNA amplicon sequencing as well as activity assays and classical molecular techniques.
I look forward to shed some light on the microbial community resilience of coastal/estuarine ecosystems.