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​Everyone is familiar with man-made oil disasters such as the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon drilling platform or damaged oil tankers that spill millions of liters of oil into the environment. But did you know that oil also leaks naturally into nature every day for thousands of years without human intervention and that nature has had time to adapt to these hostile conditions? The world's largest natural oil seep is the Pitch Lake in Trinidad and Tobago, and there are also smaller natural oil wells of this kind in Germany. The research project aims to improve the understanding of oil biodegradation by three specific algal-prokaryotic communities from our lab by studying the algal isolates and their associated bacteria and archaea (= prokaryotes) from natural oil habitats in Germany. The focus is on investigating their complex interactions, their composition and measuring their oil degradation rates in order to assess the potential of these communities for environmental applications, particularly in environmental protection.