Chair "Molecular Biodiversity Research"

[19] [20]

Reiter

Info

The head of the Centre of Molecular Biodiversity Research (zmb), also holds the chair for Molecular Biodiversity Research at the University of Bonn.

Staff

Ph.D. student

[21]

Panagiotis Provataris [21]

PhD Student

Tel: +49 228 9122-407

Fax: +49 228 9122-212

E-Mail: panosprov [at] gmail.com

[22]

Pracheta Rana [22]

Tel: +49 228 9122-421

Fax: +49 228 9122-212

E-Mail: prachetasrana [at] gmail.com

[23]

Alexandros Vasilikopoulos [23]

PhD Student

Tel: +49 228 9122-407

Fax: +49 228 9122-212

E-Mail: alexvasilikop [at] gmail.com

MSc or Diploma Candidate

[24]

Peter T. Rühr [24]

Master-Student

Tel: +49 228 9122-247

Fax: +49 228 9122-212

E-Mail: peter.ruehr [at] gmail.com

Alumni

Former staff members

[25]

Dr. Harald Letsch [25]

E-Mail: info [at] zfmk.de

Projects

2018

[26]

Non-destructive morphological studies of old museum samples using modern techniques [26]

The aim of this project is to use modern non-destructive techniques in order to asses important museum material. Traditionally, the preparation of the genitalia or other parts of the inner anatomy would require the preparation and thus the partial destruction of the sample which is often not possible with important type material. We avoid this by using approaches like µ-computed tomography to visualize the inner parts of these specimens in a non-invasive way.

Project lead:

Dr. Marianne Espeland [27]

Funding:

Zoological Research Museum Alexander Koenig

2017

[28]

Evolution of Dexiarchia [28]

The sea slugs of the subgroup Dexiarchia comprise at least 2,000 different species and many more undescribed members. Until today there exists no phylogenetic analysis of Dexiarchia that comprises all major families and corroborates the relationships within this group, which is the aim of our project.

Project lead:

Dr. Alexander Donath [29]

Funding:

Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft

2016

[30]

Leibniz-Sonderausstellung: 8 Objekte, 8 Museen [30]

Leibniz-Forschungsmuseen stellen erstmals gemeinsam aus: Das Museum Koenig wird vom 08.11.2016 bis zum 30.06.2017 (ebenso wie die anderen sieben Museen der Leibniz-Gemeinschaft) die Sonderausstellung „8 Objekte 8 Museen“ der Leibniz-Gemeinschaft präsentieren.

Project lead:

Björn Rulik [31]

Funding:

Leibniz Association, Zoological Research Museum Alexander Koenig

[32]

3D AMP [32]

This plugin works with ImageJ and Fiji. You can use most kinds of (hyper)stacks with one or more channels in the commonimage formats.

Project lead:

Jörg Adrian [33]

2014

[34]

Countering Systematic Bias in Phylogenetics [34]

PhyQuart, a new algorithm combining Hennigian logic and Maximum Likelihood estimation, represents a completely new strategy for the evaluation of molecular data based on a site pattern classification for quartets of aligned sequences.

Project lead:

Dr. Patrick Kück [35]

Funding:

Zoological Research Museum Alexander Koenig, European Union

[36]

Island speciation within the… [36]

Landsnails of the genus Theba show an endemic radiation on the Canary Islands and the adjacent West African Continent.

Project lead:

Prof. Dr. Bernhard Misof [37]

2013

[38]

GFBio [38]

Environmental and biological research is becoming central to major societal challenges related to the Earth’s ecosystems and climate dynamics. To handle the scale and complexity of the scientificquestions being addressed, there is a strong need to integrate knowledge because biological data are currently scattered and difficult to share.

Project lead:

Dr. Peter Grobe [39]

Funding:

Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft

[40]

AliGROOVE – visualization of heterogeneous sequence divergence [40]

AliGROOVE determines and visualizes the content of potentially randomized sequence similarities and alignment ambiguities in multiple sequence alignments.The AliGROOVE algorithm is an adaptation of the recently published ALISCORE masking algorithm (Misof & Misof, 2009, Kück et al., 2010). AliGROOVE summarizes site scores of profiles of sequence similarity normalized over the whole alignment length from each pairwise comparison and translates the obtained scoring distances between sequences into a similarity Matrix

Project lead:

Dr. Patrick Kück [35]

Funding:

Zoological Research Museum Alexander Koenig

2012

[41]

Identification of sources of error in molecular phylogenetic analyses [41]

The aim of our study was to test the robustness and efficiency of maximum likelihood with respect to different long branch effects on multiple-taxon trees.

Project lead:

Dr. Patrick Kück [35]

Funding:

Zoological Research Museum Alexander Koenig

[42]

Expedition for the rainforest… [42]

Expedition to the tropical lowland rainforest to collect material (insects, tree trunks, lianas, interviews) for the new rainforest exhibition.

Project lead:

Dr. Thomas Gerken [43]

Funding:

Alexander-Koenig-Society e.V.

[44]

1KITE: The evolution of the insects [44]

Insects are one of the most species-rich groups of metazoan organisms. They play a pivotal role in most non-marine ecosystems and many insect species are of enormous economical and medical importance. Unraveling the evolution of insects is essential for understanding how life in terrestrial and limnic environments evolved. The 1KITE (1K Insect Transcriptome Evolution) project aims to study the transcriptomes (that is the entirety of expressed genes) of 1,000 insect species encompassing all recognized insect orders. For each species, so-called ESTs (Expressed Sequence Tags) will be produced…

Project lead:

Prof. Dr. Bernhard Misof [37]

2011

[45]

Automated masking of AFLP markers [45]

AMARE is designed to optimize the signal-to-noise ratio in AFLP data sets (single or multiple primer combinations). It identifies potentially erroneous AFLP genotyping errors as the number of non-reproducible scored markers between replicated AFLP profiles of single individuals. As a measure of overall data quality, it simultaneously estimates general replicate error rates.

Project lead:

Dr. Patrick Kück [35]

Funding:

Zoological Research Museum Alexander Koenig

2010

[46]

FASconCAT - convenient handling of data matrices [46]

FASconCAT is a user-friendly software that concatenates rapidly different kinds of sequence data into one supermatrix file.

Project lead:

Dr. Patrick Kück [35]

Funding:

Zoological Research Museum Alexander Koenig

2007

[47]

DNA Bank Network [47]

Project lead:

Dr. Jonas Astrin [48]

Funding:

Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft

Publications

Published in

2021

Vasilikopoulos, A., Balke, M., Kukowka, S., Pflug, J. M., Martin, S., Meusemann, K., Hendrich, L., Mayer, C., Maddison, D. R., Niehuis, O., Beutel, R. G. Misof, B. (2021): Phylogenomic analyses clarify the pattern of evolution of Adephaga (Coleoptera) and highlight phylogenetic artefacts due to model misspecification and excessive data trimming. - Systematic Entomoly 46: 991-1018. https://doi.org/10.1111/syen.12508.

[read more] [54]

Links:

https://doi.org/10.1111/syen.12508 [55]

2020

Thomas, G.W.C., Dohmen, E., Hughes, D.S.T., Murali, S.C., Poelchau, M., Glasted, K., Anstead, C.A., Ayoub, N.A., Batterham, P., Bellair, M., Binford, G.J., Chao, H., Chen, Y.H., Childers, C., Dinh, H., Doddapaneni, H.V., Duan, J.J., Dugan, S., Esposito, L.A., Friedrich, M., Garb, J., Gasser, R.B., Goodisman, M.A.D., Gundersen-Rindal, D.E., Han, Y., Handler, A.M., Hatakeyama, M., Hering, L., Hunter, W.B., Ioannidid, P., Jayaseelan, J.C., Kalra, D., Khila, A., Korhonen, P.K., Lee, C.E., Lee, S.L., Li, Y., Lindsey, A.R.I., Mayer, G., McGregor, A.P., McKenna, D.D., Misof, B., Munidasa, M., Munoz-Torres, M., Muzny, D.M., Niehuis, O., Osuji-Lacy, N., Palli, S.R., Panfilio, K.A., Pechmann, M., Perry, T., Peters, R.S., Poynton, H.C., Prpic, N.-M., Qu, J., Rotenberg, D., Schal, C., Schoville, S.D., Sculy, E.D., Skinner, E., Sloan, D.B., Stouthamer, R., Strand, M.R., Szucsich, N.U., Wijeratne, A., Young, N.D., Zattara, E.E., Benoit, J.B., Zdobnov, E.M., Pfrender, M.E., Hackett, K.J., Werren, J.H., Worley, K.C., Gibbs, R.A., Chipman, A.D., Waterhouse, R.M., Bornberg-Bauer, E., Hahn, M.W., Richards, S. (2020) Gene content evolution in the arthropods. Genome Biol 21, 15. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13059-019-1925-7

[read more] [56]

Eberle, J., Ahrens, D., Mayer, C., Niehuis, O., Misof, B., 2020. A Plea for Standardized Nuclear Markers in Metazoan DNA Taxonomy. Trends in Ecology & Evolution.

[read more] [57]

Schucht, P. J., Rühr, P. T., Geier, B., Glaw, F., Lambertz, M. (2020): Armored with skin and bone: A combined histological and μCT ‐study of the exceptional integument of the Antsingy leaf chameleon Brookesia perarmata (Angel, 1933). Journal of Morphology (Early View).

[read more] [58]

Links:

Article link (Open Access) [59]
Supplementary data (µCT-scans) [60]

Song, H., Béthoux, O., Shin, S., Donath, A., Letsch, H., Liu, S., McKenna, D., Meng, G., Meusemann, K., Misof, B., Podsiadlowski, L., Zhou, X., Wipfler, B., Simon, S. (2020). Phylogenomic analysis sheds new light on the evolutionary pathways towards acoustic communication in Orthoptera. Nature Communications 11: 4939

[read more] [61]

Szucsich, N.U., Bartel, D., Blanke, A., Böhm, A., Donath, A., Fukui, M., Grove, S., Liu, S., Macek, O., Machida, R., Misof, B., Nakagaki, Y., Podsiadlowski, L., Sekiya, K., Tomizuka, S., Reumont, B.v., Waterhouse, R., Walzl, M., Meng, G., Zhou, X., Pass, G., Meusemann, K. (2020). Four myriapod relatives – but who are sisters? No end to debates on relationships among the four major myriapod subgroups. BMC Evol Biology 20: 144

[read more] [62]

Vasilikopoulos, A., Misof, B., Meusemann, K., Lieberz, D., Flouri, T., Beutel, R. G., Niehuis, O., Peters, R. S., Donath, A., Podsiadlowski, L., Mayer, C., Bartel, D., Böhm, A., Liu, S., Kapli, P., Greve, C., Jepson, J. E., Liu, X., Zhou, X., Aspöck, H., Aspöck, U. (2020): An integrative phylogenomic approach to elucidate the evolutionary history and divergence times of Neuropterida (Insecta: Holometabola). BMC Evolutionary Biology 20:64.

[read more] [63]

2019

Evangelista, D.A., Wipfler, B., Bethoux, O., Donath, A., Fujita, M., Kohli, M.K., Legendre, F., Liu, S., Machida, R., Misof, B., Peters, R.S., Podsiadlowski, L., Rust, J., Schuette, K., Tollenaar, W., Ware, J.L., Wappler, T., Zhou, X., Meusemann, K., Simon, S. (2019) An integrative phylogenomic approach illuminates the evolutionary history of cockroaches and termites (Blattodea). Proceedings of the Royal Society B 286: 20182076

[read more] [64]

Simon, S., Letsch, H., Bank, S., Buckley, T. R., Donath, A., Liu, S., Machida, R., Meusemann, K., Misof, B., Podsiadlowski, L., Zhou, X., Wipfler, B., Bradler, S. (2019): Old World and New World Phasmatodea: phylogenomics resolve the evolutionary history of stick and leaf insects. - Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution 7: 345

[read more] [65]

Beutel, R.-G., Ribera, I., Fikáček, M., Vasilikopoulos, A., Misof, B., Balke, M. (2019): The morphological evolution of the Adephaga (Coleoptera). Systematic Entomology. https://doi.org/10.1111/syen.12403

[read more] [66]

Kawahara A.Y., Plotkin D., Espeland M., Meusemann K., Toussaint E.F.A., Donath A., Gimnich F., Frandsen P.B., Zwick A., Dos Reis M., Barber J.R., Peters R.S., Liu S., Zhou X., Mayer C., Podsiadlowski L., Storer C., Yack J.E., Misof B., Breinholt J.W. (2019) Phylogenomics reveals the evolutionary timing and pattern of butterflies and moths. Proceedings of the National Acedemy of Sciences. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1907847116

[read more] [67]

McKenna, D.D., Shin, S., Ahrens, D., Balke, M., Beza-Beza, C., Clarke, D.J., Donath, A., Escalona, H.E., Friedrich, F., Letsch, H., Liu, S., Maddison, D., Mayer, C., Misof, B., Murin, P.J., Niehuis, O., Peters, R.S., Podsiadlowski, L., Pohl, H., Scully, E.D., Yan, E.V., Zhou, X., Ślipiński, A., Beutel, R.G., 2019. The evolution and genomic basis of beetle diversity. PNAS 116, 24729–24737.

[read more] [68]

Rühr, P. T., Lambertz, M. (2019): Surface contrast enhancement of integumentary structures in X‐ray tomography. - Journal of Anatomy 235 (2): 379-385; https://doi.org/10.1111/joa.13008

[read more] [69]

Links:

Article link (Open Access) [70]
Supplementary data (µCT-scans, figures, ...) [71]
Cover (Journal of Anatomy) [72]

Stritih Peljhan, N., Rühr, P.T., Buh, B., Strauß, J. (2019): Low-frequency vibration transmission and mechanosensory detection in the legs of cave crickets. Comparative Biochemistry and Physiology - Part A: Molecular & Integrative Physiology 233: 89-96

[read more] [73]

Links:

Link zum Artikel [74]

Vasilikopoulos, A., Balke, M., Beutel, R.G., Donath, A., Podsiadlowski, L., Pflug, J.M., Waterhouse, R.M., Meusemann, K., Peters, R.S., Escalona, H.E., Mayer, C., Liu, S., Hendrich, L., Alarie, Y., Bilton, D.T., Jia, F., Zhou, X., Maddison, D.R., Niehuis, O., Misof, B., (2019): Phylogenomics of the superfamily Dytiscoidea (Coleoptera: Adephaga) with an evaluation of phylogenetic conflict and systematic error. Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ympev.2019.02.022

[read more] [75]

Wipfler B, Letsch H, Frandsen PB, Kapli P, Mayer C, Bartel D, Buckley TR, Donath A, Edgerly-Rooks JS, Fujita M, Liu S, Machida R, Mashimo Y, Misof B, Niehuis O, Peters RS, Petersen M, Podsiadlowski L, Schütte K, Shimizu S, Uchifune T, Wilbrandt J, Yan E, Zhou X, Simon S (2019) Evolutionary history of Polyneoptera and its implications for our understanding of early winged insects. Proceedings of the national Academy of Sciences 116: 3024-3029

[read more] [76]

2018

Pauli, T., Burt, T., Meusemann, K, Bayless, K,. Donath, A., Podsiadlowski, L., Mayer, C., Kozlov, A., Vasilikopoulos, A., Liu, S., Zhou, X., Yeates, D., Misof, B., Peters, R.S., and Mengual, X. (2018): New data, same story: phylogenomics does not support Syrphoidea (Diptera: Syrphidae, Pipunculidae). Systematic Entomology 43(3), 447–459.

[read more] [77]

Documents:

2018_syrphoidea.pdf [78]

Sann, M., Niehuis, O., Peters, R.S., Mayer, C., Kozlov, A., Podsiadlowski, L., Bank, S., Meusemann, K., Misof, B., Bleidorn, C., Ohl, M. (2018): Phylogenomic analysis of Apoidea sheds new light on the sister group of bees. BMC Evolutionary Biology 18(1), 71. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12862-018-1155-8

[read more] [79]

Rakitov, R., Moysa, A.A., Kopylov, A.T., Moshkovskii, S.A., Peters, R.S., Meusemann, K., Misof, B., Dietrich, C.H., Johnson, K.P., Podsiadlowski, L., Walden, K.KO. (2018): Brochosomins and other novel proteins from brochosomes of leafhoppers (Insecta, Hemiptera, Cicadellidae). Insect Biochemistry and Molecular Biology 94, 10-17. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ibmb.2018.01.001

[read more] [80]

Pauli, T. , Castillo‐Cajas, R. F., Rosa, P. , Kukowka, S. , Berg, A. , van den Berghe, E. , Fornoff, F. , Hopfenmüller, S. , Niehuis, M. , Peters, R. S., Staab, M. , Strumia, F. , Tischendorf, S. , Schmitt, T. and Niehuis, O. (2018). Phylogenetic analysis of cuckoo wasps (Hymenoptera: Chrysididae) reveals a partially artificial classification at the genus level and a species‐rich clade of bee parasitoids. Systematic Entomolology. doi:10.1111/syen.12323

[read more] [81]

Contact person

[37]

Prof. Dr. Bernhard Misof [37]

Director

Chair "Systematic Zoology"

Directorate [82]

Chair Systematic Zoology [83]

+49 228 9122-200

+49 228 9122-202

b.misof [at] leibniz-lib.de

Chair "Molecular Biodiversity Research"

Reiter

Ph.D. student

MSc or Diploma Candidate

Former staff members

2018

Non-destructive morphological studies of old museum samples using modern techniques [26]

2017

Evolution of Dexiarchia [28]

2016

Leibniz-Sonderausstellung: 8 Objekte, 8 Museen [30]

3D AMP [32]

2014

Countering Systematic Bias in Phylogenetics [34]

Island speciation within the… [36]

2013

GFBio [38]

AliGROOVE – visualization of heterogeneous sequence divergence [40]

2012

Identification of sources of error in molecular phylogenetic analyses [41]

Expedition for the rainforest… [42]

1KITE: The evolution of the insects [44]

2011

Automated masking of AFLP markers [45]

2010

FASconCAT - convenient handling of data matrices [46]

2007

DNA Bank Network [47]

Pages

2021

2020

2019

2018

Pages

Contact person