Chris Rinke, The University of Queensland

Chris Rinke is a Senior Lecturer at the Australian Centre for Ecogenomics (ACE), University of Queensland, Australia. His research interests include the phylogeny, taxonomy and ecology of free living and symbiotic Bacteria and Archaea. He focuses on the majority of microbes which elude current culturing efforts and are known as “Microbial Dark Matter”. Currently, the Rinke lab uses a range of “omics” techniques to study the phylogenetic and metabolic diversity of uncultured microbes, to investigate bacterial plastic degradation (including the gut microbiomes of polystyrene eating superworms), to describe microbial and viral communities in coastal waterways, explore microbial compositions in deep-sea subsurface sediments, characterise insect microbiomes, and to identify the main microbial players in terrestrial hot springs. Chris is a member of the Genome Taxonomy Database (GTBD; gtdb.ecogenomic.org) curation team. GTDB is an initiative to establish a standardised microbial taxonomy based on genome phylogeny.