A Remarkable Master’s Thesis on Germ-Free Insect Models

Last week, my Master’s student Stefan Schmidt presented a truly creative and exceptional thesis.

As part of his work, he developed a novel reactor system that now allows us to maintain our model organism Manduca sexta under germ-free conditions. This is a major step forward and opens the door to “humanizing” the microbiome—bringing our model closer to human physiology.

With this, we significantly improve the translational potential of our system to study chronic inflammatory bowel diseases such as Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis.

We of course celebrated this outstanding achievement together as a group.

A big thank you to the entire team—and especially to Stefan Schmidt (center) for this excellent work!