Mikrobial Power - New Ways Forward to Adresss Climate Crisis

From artificial photosynthesis to ATP from electricity: Tobias Erb, director at the Max Planck Institute in Marburg, believes that new solutions can be found at the intersection of different disciplines. But how can we become more efficient than nature? How can we teach E. coli, the 'workhorse bacterium' of biotechnology, new biochemical processes? Prof. Dr. Erb is particularly interested in the binding and conversion of the greenhouse gas CO₂. Taking inspiration from nature, he and his team use synthetic biology to find new solutions for future sustainability, according to the motto: out of the atmosphere and into the bioeconomy.

Tobias J. Erb is a synthetic biologist and Director at the Max Planck Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology in Marburg, Germany. He studied chemistry and biology, receiving his doctorate in 2009 from the universities of Freiburg and Ohio State (USA). Following a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Illinois, Erb led a junior research group at ETH Zurich from 2011 to 2014, before moving to the Max Planck Institute in Marburg. He has been director there since 2017.
He has received numerous awards, including research prizes from the Swiss and German Societies for Microbiology (SGM and VAAM), the Otto Bayer Prize (2018), the Prix Forcheur (2021) and the Future Insight Award (2023).
In 2023, he was elected a member of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina. In 2024, he received the Leibniz Prize from the German Research Foundation (DFG).