Sonja-Verena Albers - Biography#

Dr. Albers is currently a full professor for Microbiology at the University of Freiburg, Germany. She started her career in the laboratory of Prof. Dr. Wolfram Zillig, one of the founders of Molecular biology of Archaea at the Max Plank Institute for Biochmistry, Martinsried, Germany. There she started to work with crenarchaea and was then the first to study transport processes in Archaea in detail during her PhD thesis (Groningen, Netherlands). Research in most Archaea was for a long time very descriptive as for most archaea genetic systems were not available. Once a first deletion system for Sulfolobales (in this case Sulfolobus solfataricus) was described, Dr. Albers optimized this system and freely distributed it into the archaeal community (2000). This pushed the field forward as finally other questions could be asked and gene and protein function could be studied in vivo. In collaboration with Dr. Schleper, she developed then the first reliable virus-based expression system which further improved the genetic toolbox available for S. solfataricus (2006). Again, she freely distributed this tool in the community which led to more than 20 articles resulting from collaborations where these tools were applied. Once Dr. Albers had established her lab at the Max Planck Institute for terrestrial Microbiology, Marburg, Germany, she established a diverse and stabile genetic toolbox for S. acidocaldarius (2012) which led to many collaborations in the field and more than 30 collaborative manuscripts with researchers all over the world so far. This system is now widely used because she invited many scientists to her laboratory to learn these methods. Furthermore, she has often created mutants for other groups, thereby strongly contributing to many different fields. A major focus of Dr. Albers is to study the assembly of the archaeal cell envelope and especially the structure and function of archaeal cell surface structures. Thereby she described unique community-based repair systems with rely on species-specific cell-cell aggregation and was spearheading structural studies on the archaeal motility structure. Dr Albers has been very active in the archaeal community to promote research in this field and is actively traing to promote archaeal research in other fields to rise the awareness for these important organism and to make them more accessible. At the moment Dr. Albers is focusing on opening the field of archaeal cell biology which has started to reveal many new and unique traits about archaea and their molecular biology.