Daniel Podlesny is a Research Scientist in Peer Bork’s group at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg. His research focuses on the interface of human and environmental microbiomes, and he also leads infrastructure projects within NFDI4Microbiota to make microbiome data FAIR and open.

His most recent work, published in Cell, presents a planetary-scale analysis of microbiome structure and gene flow across diverse habitats. The study identified ecologically tolerant “generalist” microbes that thrive across environments and act as genetic bridges between otherwise distinct microbial communities. It demonstrates how human activity accelerates their dispersal, facilitating the spread of genes, including those conferring antimicrobial resistance, across ecosystems via horizontal gene transfer, thereby linking environmental, animal, and human microbiomes at a global scale.

Daniel received his Ph.D. from the University of Hohenheim in 2022, where he developed methods for strain-resolved tracking of microbes in metagenomes. He has applied these approaches to study microbial transmission and persistence across the human lifespan, including mother-to-infant transfer and bacteriotherapies such as probiotics and fecal microbiota transplantation. Prior to joining EMBL, he worked at Roche in Basel on integrating human genetics and microbiome data.