Fatty acids are essential as storage and structural compounds in any organism. Many fatty acids cannot be synthesized by animals but only by specific microbes and plants and animals acquire them with food. This has important implications in ecological research. There are ample of studies that use "biomarker" fatty acids to describe microbial communities in soils (phospholipid fatty acids) and track pathways of energy and biomass through food webs (via neutral lipid fatty acids).
Anton will present principles of these approaches and describe their applications in the general ecology.

Bio: Anton is a soil animal ecologist in pursuit to understand how animals affect ecosystem functioning and global biogeochemistry. He is keen on describing and understanding general ecological patterns. He has specific interests in food webs, stable isotope and molecular methods.
At present, Anton is working as Head of Soil Zoology department at Senckenberg Museum for Natural Sciences Görlitz and as a Professor at TU Dresden. He graduated and finished his PhD (2015) at the Moscow State University. Then he moved to the University of Göttingen as a postdoc studying the effect of tropical deforestation on soil biodiversity (2016-2022) and to iDiv, Leipzig as a group lead (2022-2023) after receiving an Emmy Noether grant by DFG.