Göttingen Graduate Center for Neurosciences, Biophysics, and Molecular Biosciences

Morgenstern, Burkhard, Prof. Dr.

Professor of Bioinformatics


  • 1993 Diploma (Mathematics), LMU München
  • 1996 PhD (Dr. Math.), Universität Bielefeld
  • 1997 - 1998 Visiting Scientist, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC, USA
  • 1998 - 2000 RPR/Aventis, Dagenham, Essex, UK
  • 2000 - 2001 MIPS, MPI für Biochemie, Martinsried and GSF, Neuherberg
  • 2001 - 2002 Group leader and faculty member at International Graduate School in Bioinformatics and Genome Research, Univertität Bielefeld
  • Since 2002 Professor of Bioinformatics, Universität Göttingen



Major Research Interests

The focus of our research work is algorithm and software development for nucleic acid and protein sequence analysis; the multiple-alignment program "DIALIGN" and the gene-finding program "AUGUSTUS" are widely used tools that have been developed in our department. More recently, we started to work on word-matching statistics and on alignment-free approaches to comparative sequence analysis; here we developed the tools "Filtered Spaced Word Matches", "kmacs", "Rasbhari", "Prot-SpaM", "Multi-SpaM", "Read-SpaM" and "Slope-SpaM".

Other areas of research in our department include phylogeny reconstruction, metagenomics, motif discovery and remote homology detection using machine learning methods, genome annotation for prokaryotes, recombinations in viral genomes and HIV classification using coalescent theory.



Homepage Department/Research Group

http://www.gobics.de/burkhard/



Selected Recent Publications


  • Hosseini M, Pratas D, Morgenstern B, Pinho AJ (2020) Smash++: an alignment-free and memory-efficient tool to find genomic rearrangements. GigaScience 9: giaa048
  • Röhling S, Linne A, Schellhorn J, Hosseini M, Dencker T, Morgenstern B (2020) The number of k-mer matches between two DNA sequences as a function of k and applications to estimate phylogenetic distances. PLOS ONE 15: e0228070
  • Dencker T, Leimeister CA, Gerth M, Bleidorn C, Snir S, Morgenstern B (2020) Multi-SpaM: a Maximum-Likelihood approach to Phylogeny reconstruction using Multiple Spaced-word Matches and Quartet Trees. NAR Genomics and Bioinformatics 2: lqz013
  • Lau AK, Dörrer S, Leimeister C-A, Bleidorn C, Morgenstern B (2019) Read-SpaM: assembly-free and alignment-free comparison of bacterial genomes with low sequencing coverage. BMC Bioinformatics 20, 638
  • Zielezinski A, Girgis HZ, Bernard G, Leimeister C-A, Tang K, Dencker T, Lau AK, Röhling S, Choi J, Waterman MS, Comin C, Kim S-H, Vinga S, Almeida JS, Chan CX, James B,
    Sun F, Morgenstern B, Karlowski WM (2019) Benchmarking of alignment-free sequence comparison methods. Genome Biology 20: 144
  • Leimeister C-A, Dencker T, Morgenstern B (2019) Accurate multiple alignment of distantly related genome sequences using filtered spaced word matches as anchor points. Bioinformatics 35: 211-218
  • Leimeister C-A, Schellhorn J, Dörrer S, Gerth M, Bleidorn C, Morgenstern B (2019) Prot-SpaM: Fast alignment-free phylogeny reconstruction based on whole-proteome sequences GigaScience 8, giy148
  • Morgenstern B, Schöbel S, Leimeister C-A (2017) Phylogeny reconstruction based on the length distribution of k-mismatch common substrings. Algorithms for Molecular Biology 12: 27
  • Leimeister C-A, Sohrabi-Jahromi S, Morgenstern B (2017) Fast and accurate phylogeny reconstruction using filtered spaced-word matches. Bioinformatics 33: 971-979
  • Hahn L, Leimeister C-A, Ounit R, Lonardi S, Morgenstern B (2016) rasbhari: Optimizing spaced seeds for database searching, read mapping and alignment-free sequence
    comparison. PLOS Computational Biology 12(10): e1005107
  • Morgenstern B, B Zhu B, Horwege S, Leimeister C-A (2015) Estimating evolutionary distances between genomic sequences from spaced-word matches. Algorithms for Molecular Biology 10: 5