Julia A. Vorholt (born September 15, 1969) is a full professor of microbiology at ETH Zurich and an elected member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina. She earned her PhD in 1997 under professor Rudolph K. Thauer at the Max Planck Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology, for which she was awarded the Otto Hahn Medal, and is a German national residing in Switzerland.
Current projects of the Vorholt lab at ETH Zurich include:
Phyllosphere microbiology: Characterizing and understanding standing microbial communities on above-ground plant surfaces, and their impact on plant health and productivity.Metabolism of one-carbon compounds: The bacterial pathways that allow growth on single carbon compounds, especially methane and methanol.Bacterial stress response: Pathways and regulation of mechanisms involved in bacterial stress response.Single cell technologies: Development of microfluidics, single cell force spectroscopy, and other techniques to gather data and manipulate individual cells.In addition, work from her lab was significant in refuting previous claims by NASA scientists that the arsenic-tolerant bacteria GFAJ-1 could utilize arsenic instead of phosphorus in DNA and other essential biomolecules.
As of 2013 she had 90 publications, and as of 2015 her work has been cited approximately 4100 times.
Chistoserdova L, Vorholt JA, Thauer RK, Lidstrom ME (1998). "C1 transfer enzymes and coenzymes linking methylotrophic bacteria and methanogenic Archaea". Science. 281 (5373): 99–102. doi:10.1126/science.281.5373.99. Delmotte N, Knief C, Chaffron S, Innerebner G, Roschitzki B, et al. (2009). "Community proteogenomics reveals insights into the physiology of phyllosphere bacteria". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA. 106 (38): 16428–16433. doi:10.1073/pnas.0905240106. Vorholt, Julia A. "Microbial life in the phyllosphere". Nature Reviews Microbiology. 10 (12): 828–840. doi:10.1038/nrmicro2910. Elias M, Wellner A, Goldin-Azulay K, Chabriere E, Vorholt JA, Erb TJ, Tawfik DS (2012). "The molecular basis of phosphate discrimination in arsenate rich environments". Nature. 491: 134–137. PMID 23034649. doi:10.1038/nature11517. Campagne S, Damberger FF, Kaczmarczyk A, Francez-Charlot A, Allain FH, Vorholt JA (2012). "Structural basis for sigma factor mimicry in the general stress response of Alphaproteobacteria". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA. 109: E1405–14. doi:10.1073/pnas.1117003109. 
