Ing. Marion Meima-Franke (1969) graduated in 1993 as a research technician in medical biochemistry at the Hogeschool Enschede.
She worked for 4 years in two different jobs at the Rijksuniversiteit Groningen. In her first job, she tried to accelerate the ripening time of cheese, with the help of genetically modified strains. The second job (in collaboration with the Academic Hospital of Groningen) dealt with a cardiac disease called atrial fibrillation (AF).
After Groningen, she worked for two years as a research technician at the University of Washington, Seattle, USA. Here, she worked on two projects dealing with expression of genes involved in C1 metabolism in 1) pmmo genes, and 2) AM1 (mox genes).
In March 2000, she joined the NIOO-KNAW-Centre for Limnology, where she worked together with Dr. Ingmar Janse and Dr. Gabriël Zwart on the Dynatox project. This project aimed to provide insight into dynamics and toxin production of potentially toxic cyanobacteria in a few Dutch lakes as well as to investigate conditions that influence growth and toxin production.
SInce 2003, she has worked as a lab assistant for Dr. P.L.E. Bodelier on a variety of projects involving methane oxidizing bacteria.
In 2017 the NIOO invested in a new flowsorter, the BD Influx. She is trained to use this flowsorter on behalf of her departement Microbial Ecology.
Functional Ecology of methane oxidizing bacteria
Methane oxidizing bacteria (MOB) utilize methane as their carbon and energy source. They perform this process in many ecosystems (soils, sediments lakes, permafrost etc) thereby reducing the emission of this greenhouse gas to the atmosphere. We study MOB in the lab as well as in the field. One of the most recent findings was the strong positive stimulation of MOB by other non-methanotrophic bacteria mediated by volatile compounds. We used special incubations chambers and a volatolomics approach to perform these confrontation assays. We are performing experiments to verify mechanisms of these interactions, but results indicate an as yet unexplored mechanisms of control of major biogeochemical cycles. The work on methane consumption among others, aims at assessing feedbacks of climate change on atmospheric composition and is part of the NIOO theme Global Change.