Devangi Sathe

Life sustaining under extreme conditions is something I have always been fascinated by. I have recently joined as a PhD student at the HADAL group, wherein we will be doing some exciting experiments to study organic matter degradation by microbes in the deep-sea. We will be using several different strategies like measuring oxygen respiration rates, calculating enzyme activity rates, quantifying carbon uptake and carbon-use efficiency of microbes, analysing the metatranscriptome of microbial communities from the deep-sea to see how different environmental parameters such as pressure, temperature, type of organic carbon source affect the overall microbial activity. These combined efforts will provide novel insights into the dynamics of carbon turnover by microbes in the deep-sea.