The right and privilege to independently represent two disciplines in both research and teaching In February 2023, I have successfully completed my postdoctoral habilitation qualification and was awarded the “Lehrbefugnis” (academic license to teach) in two academic disciplines: botany and bioinformatics. The certificate of habilitation confers upon the recipient the right and privilege to independently […]
Archiv der Kategorie 'Allgemein'
Texas mountain laurel in the hill country
Mountains in Texas? Dermatophyllum secundiflorum (Fabaceae), to most Texans commonly known as the ‘Texas mountain laurel’, is a small, evergreen tree that is planted in various regions of Texas and northern Mexico. Its fragrant purple flowers, which are aggregated into long racemes, and its comparatively high drought tolerance make this plant a popular ornamental plant. […]
The petal color of Texas bluebonnets
Not always blue. Lupinus texensis (Fabaceae), commonly known as the Texas bluebonnet, is the official state flower (or rather, state plant) of Texas. Given its vernacular name, many people would expect the flower color (or more precisely, the petal color) of Lupinus texensis to be blue. More often than not, the petal color of that […]
Talk and workshop at Botany 2021
Summer time is conference time. As part of the joint conference (“Botany 2021 – Virtual!“) of several North American botanical and mycological societies, I am giving two scientific presentations: a regular talk in the topic section on comparative genomics and a workshop presentation. The workshop has been recorded and can be viewed online here (login […]
Simple indel coding “for to go”
The process of coding insertions and deletions in a multi-species DNA alignment such that the presence of these indels can be used as additional information in a phylogenetic investigation is typically referred to as “indel coding”. Multiple indel coding schemes exist, with a scheme proposed by Simmons and Ochoterena (2000; often referred to as “simple […]
New Paper – An R package for visualizing plastome coverage depth
Visualizing the depth I just published a new paper on an R package that assists users in visualizing the coverage depth of a plastid genome in relation to its circular, quadripartite genome structure. Co-author of the software is an undergraduate student, who (as part of his bachelor thesis) designed the visualization engine of the software.
New paper – A Python package for large-scale DNA sequence submissions
Large-scale DNA sequence submissions to ENA I just published a new paper on a Python package to submit large DNA sequence datasets to ENA. Special thanks go out to a master’s student of mine who was fantastic in assisting me with testing and debugging the software!
Teaching in Spring 2019
Teaching. “Usus artium magister, dicendo dicere discunt.” (Eucharium Eyering, Copiae Proverbium)
Commandline search interface for ENA
Digging through ENA records. By using the Python library enasearch, which provides a Python-based interaction with ENA’s API, commandline searches of the ENA databases have become a delight. Take, for example, the aim to infer the number of individual accessions of the common plant DNA barcoding marker trnK-matK that have become available over the course […]
Botanical field trip in the Carinthian Alps
Alpine plants in the mist An alpine field trip in late September can mean cold temperatures and lots of foggy weather. Interesting plants abound nonetheless.
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