Prof. Dr. Nicole Dubilier is a marinemicrobiologist and director of the Symbiosis Department at the Max Planck Institute for Marine Biology since 2013 and a Professor of Microbial Symbioses at the University of Bremen. She is a pioneer in ecological and evolutionary symbiotic relationships between sea animals and their microbial partners inhabiting environments that harbour low nutrient concentrations. She was responsible for the discovery of a new form of symbiosis between two kinds of bacteria and the marine oligochaete Olavius algarvensis.
Early life
Her father was an american businessman and her mother was a german immigrant descendant of the physician and electrophysiology pioneer Emil du Bois-Reymond and Fanny Mendelssohn a renowned pianist and composer. At a young age, Nicole Dubilier's first aspirations ventured into the artistic realm of classical ballet. In 1970 Stuttgart Ballet accepted her to train with John Cranko. However, she decided to stay in Wiesbaden with her mother and three siblings. During her primary education, basic science did not feature on her repertoire of interests, yet her visits to the Fire Island and an internship at the marine station on Helgoland carved her prospective in Marine Biology.
Career
In 1985, Dubilier obtained her degree in Zoology, Biochemistry and Microbiology and completed her Ph.D. in Marine Biology at the University Hamburg with Olav Giere in 1992. During her graduate studies, she found herself dispassionate about her research, often wanting to quit, but her persistence propelled her to the finishline. In 1992, motivated to re-discover the excitement of her field, Dubilier attended a molecular biology summer course taught by Donald Manahan at University of Southern California. Later, from 1993-1995, she experienced her first Post-doc with the guidance of Colleen Cavanaugh on hydrothermal vents chemosynthetic life forms. Two years later, she started her career at the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology, first as a Postdoc studying the Evolution of bacterial symbiosis in gutless worms and afterwards as the Coordinator of the MPI-MM International Research Program, Head of the Symbiosis Laboratory and the Head of the Symbiosis Department.. Dubilier has continued her work on symbiotic relationships within chemosynthetic living organisms, expanding her exploration of both shallow and deep-sea environments, ranging from seagrass to coastal sediments, through meta-omic approaches, e.g. metaproteomics and metagenomics. Her primary animal models constitute of shrimp, gutless-worms, nematodes, and ciliates.
McFall-Ngai M., Hadfield M.G., Bosch T.C.G., Carey H.V., Domazet-Lošo T., Douglas A.D., Dubilier N., Eberl G., Fukami T., Gilbert S.F., Hentschel U., King N., Kjelleberg S., Knoll A.H., Kremer N., Mazmanian S.K., Metcalf J.L., Nealson K., Pierce N.E., Rawls J.F., Reid A., Ruby E.G., Rumpho M., Sanders JG., Tautz D., and Wernegreen J.J.. "Animals in a bacterial world, a new imperative for the life sciences". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 110, 3229-3236; https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1218525110
Dubilier N., Bergin C, Lott C."Symbiotic diversity in marine animals: the art of harnessing chemosynthesis".Nature Reviews in Microbiology 6 :725-40; https://doi.org/10.1038/nrmicro1992.
Woyke T., Teeling H., Ivanova N.N., Huntemann M., Richter M., Gloeckner F.O., Boffelli D., Anderson I.J., Barry K.W., Shapiro H.J., Szeto E., Kyrpides N.C., Mussmann M., Amann R., Bergin C., Ruehland C., Rubin E.M., Dubilier N.. "Symbiosis insights through metagenomic analysis of a microbial consortium". Nature 443, 950; https://doi.org/10.1038/nature05192
Dubilier N., Mülders C., Ferdelman T., de Beer D., Pernthaler A., Klein M., Wagner M., Erséus C., Thiermann F., Krieger J., Giere O. and Amann R.. "Endosymbiotic sulfate-reducing and sulphide-oxidizing bacteria in an oligochaete worm". Nature 411, 298; https://doi.org/10.1038/35077067
