On the trail of animals with leaf swabs and flies

Fabian Leendertz with a group of students standing with their backs to the camera — Prof. Fabian Leendertz explains the work of the Helmholtz Institute for One Health to the students of the CiFly project

News

02/27/2025

Pupils from Greifswald's Humboldt-Gymnasium will work with the Helmholtz Institute for One Health to compare innovative methods for monitoring biodiversity and antibiotic-resistant bacteria in and around the Greifswald Zoo

Today, the Citizen Science project CiFly will enter its second year. This year, 9th and 10th grade students from the Alexander-von-Humboldt-Gymnasium will again have the opportunity to get to know the Helmholtz Institute for One Health (HIOH), but also the chance to explore the biobank of the University Medical Center and the Greifswald Zoo from the perspective of a researcher.

These young students will take on the role of scientists and experimentally answer questions that are relevant to research at the Helmholtz Institute for One Health (HIOH) and beyond. To this end, they will work with established scientists in small groups to collect, document and analyze water samples, flies and leaf swabs and learn how to clearly present their results. In doing so, students will gain insights into the topics of One Health, biodiversity, infections and antimicrobial resistance, while at the same time be sensitized to the complex ecosystems in their environment.

CiFly is part of the One Health Region Vorpommern, which is supported by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research within the initiative ‘T!Raum - Transfer Spaces for the Future of Regions’ under the direction of the University of Greifswald.

Two scientists working in groups with three pupils — HIOH staff Dr. Madeleine Paditz and Dr. Johanna Eberhard with students from the CiFly project

“In the first year, there was an intensive exchange between students and scientists, and both sides learned a lot from working together. This year, we are particularly looking forward to the collaboration with the zoo, which offers the students an exciting research environment and allows us to collect samples on a large scale and compare different scientific methods,” says Dr Johanna Eberhard, who coordinates the project at the HIOH. The HIOH is a site of the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research (HZI) in Braunschweig in cooperation with the University of Greifswald, the University Medicine Greifswald and the Friedrich-Loeffler-Institut.

According to Dr Jan Gogarten, a scientist at the HIOH, the students in the first year of the project confirmed the experiences of the scientists in the field: “Collecting flies can be a real challenge! That's why we want to use an even simpler method this time. We recently published a paper showing that a single leaf swab collected in a tropical ecosystem detects the traces of on average eight vertebrates. Swabs are really easy to collect, but there are a lot of open questions about how long DNA persists on leaves, how far it disperses away from animals, and the types of species we can detect with this approach. We are really excited to work with students to answer these and other questions they come up with,“ says Jan Gogarten.

A scientist explains a laboratory method on a screen — An HIOH scientist explains a laboratory method used in the CiFly citizen science project

Ulf Burmeister, head of the Alexander-von-Humboldt-Gymnasium, adds: ‘The Alexander-von-Humboldt-Gymnasium is extremely pleased to be able to benefit from the collaboration with the Helmholtz Institute for the second year in a row. Our students deliberately chose this elective course so that they could work with the scientists at the HIOH on this project. The feedback from the participating students and the course instructor, Ms Bernhardt, shows that this collaboration has been very successful over the past year. The connection to scientific practice is of great importance for our students' school education as well as for their career and study orientation. We are very interested in further collaboration with the Helmholtz Institute for One Health.”

The Greifswald Zoo is also looking forward to the collaboration: “The Greifswald Zoo is happy to support this joint project of the Humboldt-Gymnasium and the HIOH. We hope that this will help us gain further insights into which animal species are not only in the enclosures in our zoo,” says Dr Andreas Kerath, managing director of the Greifswald Zoo.

Press contact

Dr Johanna Eberhard

Scientific Coordinator

+49 3834 3916-120 E-Mail

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