Björn Marcus Von Reumont

Björn Marcus Von Reumont
Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main · Faculty of Biological Sciences

Dr. rer. nat. habil.

About

119
Publications
89,792
Reads
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4,890
Citations
Introduction
Current scientific focus: 1) Venomics - comparative venom research of understudied venomous invertebrates and pancrustaceans http://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/risking-life-and-limb-for-venom.htm 2) Evolutionary genomics to address toxin gene evolution of early and aculeate hymenopterans, robber flies (Asilidae/Diptera) and other insects and crustaceans 3) Pancrustacean evolution 4) Toxin activity and bioprospecting WebPresence: • http://www.venom-evolution.de • twitter @BReumont
Additional affiliations
April 2018 - December 2021
• University of Gießen & Fraunhofer Institute for Molecular Biology and Applied Ecology
Position
  • Research Associate
October 2015 - March 2018
University of Leipzig, Faculty of Biosciences, Pharmacology and Psychology
Position
  • Professor (Assistant)
January 2015 - July 2015
Research Museum Alexander Koenig
Position
  • Fellow
Education
February 2020 - February 2020
University of Leipzig
Field of study
  • Zoology, Phylogenomics and venomics of remiped crustaceans and evolutionary venomics of other neglected invertebrates
October 2005 - January 2010
University of Bonn
Field of study
  • Phylogeny of crustaceans (multi gene and phylogenomic data)
October 1998 - April 2005
University of Bonn
Field of study
  • Biology; Master thesis on Phylogeography of zygaenid lepidopterans

Publications

Publications (119)
Article
Full-text available
Remipedes are a small and enigmatic group of crustaceans, first described only 30 years ago. Analyses of both morphological and molecular data have recently suggested a close relationship between Remipedia and Hexapoda. If true, the remipedes occupy an important position in pancrustacean evolution and may be pivotal for understanding the evolutiona...
Article
Full-text available
Animal venoms have evolved many times. Venomous species are especially common in three of the four main groups of arthropods (Chelicerata, Myriapoda, Hexapoda), which together represent tens of thousands of species of venomous spiders, scorpions, centipedes and hymenopterans. Surprisingly, despite their great diversity of body plans there is no una...
Article
Full-text available
We report the first integrated proteomic and transcriptomic investigation of a crustacean venom. Remipede crustaceans are the venomous sister group of hexapods, and the venom glands of the remipede Xibalbanus tulumensis express a considerably more complex cocktail of proteins and peptides than previously thought. We identified 32 venom protein fami...
Article
Full-text available
Background Venoms and the toxins they contain represent molecular adaptations that have evolved on numerous occasions throughout the animal kingdom. However, the processes that shape venom protein evolution are poorly understood because of the scarcity of whole-genome data available for comparative analyses of venomous species. Results We performe...
Article
Full-text available
Background Venoms, which have evolved numerous times in animals, are ideal models of convergent trait evolution. However, detailed genomic studies of toxin-encoding genes exist for only a few animal groups. The hyper-diverse hymenopteran insects are the most speciose venomous clade, but investigation of the origin of their venom genes has been larg...
Article
Full-text available
We present a reference genome assembly from an individual male Violet Carpenter Bee (Xylocopa violacea, Linnaeus 1758). The assembly is 1.02 gigabases in span. 48% of the assembly is scaffolded into 17 pseudo-chromosomal units. The mitochondrial genome has also been assembled and is 21.8 kilobases in length. The genome is highly repetitive, likely...
Article
Full-text available
We present a reference genome assembly from an individual male Violet Carpenter Bee (Xylocopa violacea, Linnaeus 1758). The assembly is 1.02 gigabases in span. 48% of the assembly is scaffolded into 17 pseudo-chromosomal units. The mitochondrial genome has also been assembled and is 21.8 kilobases in length. The genome is highly repetitive, likely...
Preprint
Full-text available
We present a reference genome assembly from an individual male Violet Carpenter Bee (Xylocopa violacea, Linnaeus, 1758). The assembly is 1.02 gigabases in span. 48% of the assembly is scaffolded into 17 pseudo-chromosomal units. The mitochondrial genome has also been assembled and is 21.8 kilobases in length. The genome is highly repetitive, likely...
Article
Full-text available
Background The identification of novel toxins from overlooked and taxonomically exceptional species bears potential for various pharmacological applications. The remipede Xibalbanus tulumensis, an underwater cave-dwelling crustacean, is the only crustacean for which a venom system has been described. Its venom contains several xibalbin peptides tha...
Article
Full-text available
Research on animal venoms and their components spans multiple disciplines, including biology, biochemistry, bioinformatics, pharmacology, medicine, and more. Manipulating and analyzing the diverse array of data required for venom research can be challenging, and relevant tools and resources are often dispersed across different online platforms, mak...
Presentation
Full-text available
Teaching Lecture Botany (Fabaceae), Grundpraktikum
Preprint
Full-text available
Venoms, which have evolved numerous times in animals, are ideal models of convergent trait evolution. However, detailed genomic studies of toxin-encoding genes exist for only a few animal groups. The hyper-diverse hymenopteran insects are the most speciose venomous clade, but investigation of the origin of their venom genes has been largely neglect...
Article
Full-text available
The venom of honeybees is composed of numerous peptides and proteins and has been used for decades as an anti-inflammatory and anti-cancer agent in traditional medicine. However, the bioactivity of specific biomolecular components has been evaluated for the predominant constituent, melittin. So far, only a few melittin-like peptides from solitary b...
Article
Full-text available
Venoms have evolved >100 times in all major animal groups, and their components, known as toxins, have been fine-tuned over millions of years into highly effective biochemical weapons. There are many outstanding questions on the evolution of toxin arsenals, such as how venom genes originate, how venom contributes to the fitness of venomous species,...
Article
Full-text available
Modern venomics is increasing its focus on hymenopterans such as honeybees, bumblebees, parasitoid wasps, ants and true wasps. However solitary bees remain understudied in comparison and the few available venom studies focus on short melittin-like sequences and antimicrobial peptides. Herein we describe the first comprehensive venom profile of a so...
Article
Full-text available
Jüngste Erkenntnisse aus der modernen Tiergiftforschung zeigen, dass die Vorfahren der Hundertfüßer vermutlich ein recht simples Gift mit wenigen neurotoxischen Komponenten und Enzymen besaßen. Dieser Giftcocktail wurde im Laufe der Evolution unerwartet stark verändert und an die heutige Lebensweise der Hundertfüßer angepasst. Tatsächlich gibt es k...
Article
Full-text available
Spiders are diverse, predatory arthropods that have inhabited Earth for around 400 million years. They are well known for their complex venom systems that are used to overpower their prey. Spider venoms contain many proteins and pep-tides with highly specific and potent activities suitable for biomedical or agrochemical applications, but the key ro...
Article
Full-text available
Arthropod venoms offer a promising resource for the discovery of novel bioactive peptides and proteins, but the limited size of most species translates into minuscule venom yields. Bioactivity studies based on traditional fractionation are therefore challenging, so alternative strategies are needed. Cell-free synthesis based on synthetic gene fragm...
Article
Full-text available
Spiders are one of the most successful groups of venomous animals, but surprisingly few species have been examined in sufficient detail to determine the structure of their venom systems. To learn more about the venom system of the family Araneidae (orb-weavers), we selected the wasp spider (Argiope bruennichi) and examined the general structure and...
Article
Full-text available
Venom research is a highly multidisciplinary field that involves multiple subfields of biology, informatics, pharmacology, medicine, and other areas. These different research facets are often technologically challenging and pursued by different teams lacking connection with each other. This lack of coordination hampers the full development of venom...
Article
Full-text available
Background Phylogenetic relationships among the myriapod subgroups Chilopoda, Diplopoda, Symphyla and Pauropoda are still not robustly resolved. The first phylogenomic study covering all subgroups resolved phylogenetic relationships congruently to morphological evidence but is in conflict with most previously published phylogenetic trees based on d...
Article
Full-text available
Toxins evolved convergently in all major animal groups for predation, defense or competition. They are either actively employed with a de- livery apparatus as venoms, or passively secreted as poisons. The evo- lutionary arms race between toxicity and resistance in predators and their prey optimised effective toxin cocktails, which thus represent po...
Chapter
Although Crustacea has a long history of being recognized as a formal taxonomic group in arthropod classification, the past 30 years have witnessed repeated challenges to crustaceanmonophyly. Few unambiguous autapomorphic characters for crustaceans have been proposed by morphologists, and many diagnostic characters can be interpreted as symplesiomo...
Article
This volume examines Evolution and Biogeography of Crustacea, one of the dominant groups of animals, especially in aquatic environments. The first part of this volume is dedicated to the explanation of the origins and successful establishment of the Crustacea in the oceans. In the second part the biogeography of the Crustacea is explored in order t...
Article
Full-text available
Nemerteans (ribbon worms) employ toxins to subdue their prey, but research thus far has focused on the small-molecule components of mucus secretions and few protein toxins have been characterized. We carried out a preliminary proteotranscriptomic analysis of putative toxins produced by the hoplonemertean Amphiporus lactifloreus (Hoplonemertea, Amph...
Article
Full-text available
Spiders use venom to subdue their prey, but little is known about the diversity of venoms in different spider families. Given the limited data available for orb-weaver spiders (Araneidae), we selected the wasp spider Argiope bruennichi for detailed analysis. Our strategy combined a transcriptomics pipeline based on multiple assemblies with a dual p...
Preprint
Full-text available
Spiders use venom to subdue their prey, but little is known about the diversity of venoms in different spider families. Given the limited data available for orb-weaver spiders (Araneidae) we selected the wasp spider Argiope bruennichi for detailed analysis. Our strategy combined a transcriptomics pipeline based on multiple assemblies with a dual pr...
Article
Full-text available
The tremendous diversity of Hymenoptera is commonly attributed to the evolution of parasitoidism in the last common ancestor of parasitoid sawflies (Orussidae) and wasp-waisted Hymenoptera (Apocrita). However, Apocrita and Orussidae differ dramatically in their species richness, indicating that the diversification of Apocrita was promoted by additi...
Article
Full-text available
Within mega-diverse Hymenoptera, non-aculeate parasitic wasps represent 75% of all hymenopteran species. Their ovipositor dual-functionally injects venom and employs eggs into (endoparasitoids) or onto (ectoparasitoids) diverse host species. Few endoparasitoid wasps such as Pimpla turionellae paralyze the host and suppress its immune responses, suc...
Article
Full-text available
Centipedes are among the most ancient groups of venomous predatory arthropods. Extant species belong to five orders, but our understanding of the composition and evolution of centipede venoms is based almost exclusively on one order, Scolopendromorpha. To gain a broader and less biased understanding we performed a comparative proteotranscriptomic a...
Article
Full-text available
Venoms evolved convergently in diverse animal lineages as key adaptations that increase the evolutionary fitness of species which are manifold employed for defense, predation, and competition. They constitute complex cocktails of various toxins that feature a broad range of bioactivities. The majority of described venom proteins belong to protein f...
Article
Full-text available
The complete mitochondrial genome of Dasypogon diadema (Insecta: Diptera) was sequenced using the Illumina MiSeq` platform. Its mt-genome spans over 16,947 bp with a GC content of 26.6% containing 13 protein-coding genes, 22 tRNA genes, and 2 rRNA genes. The phylogenetic relationship of Dasypogon diadema and 11 other dipteran species was reconstruc...
Poster
Full-text available
Venomous animals produce a variety of bioactive compounds, which act selective against physiological targets, including ion channels, receptors or enzymes. Animal venom based developed drugs could play a key role in combating cardiovascular diseases, chronic pain, bacterial infections, or serve as ecofriendly insecticides. The tremendous diversity...
Article
Full-text available
Venoms are evolutionary key adaptations that species employ for defense, predation or competition. However, the processes and forces that drive the evolution of venoms and their toxin components remain in many aspects understudied. In particular, the venoms of many smaller, neglected (mostly invertebrate) organisms are not characterized in detail,...
Conference Paper
Our recent study contributing proteomic data revealed that the venom glands of the anchialine cave dwelling remipede crustacean Xibalbanus tulumensis express a complex cocktail of proteins and peptides. In the first integrated proteomic and transcriptomic analyses 32 venom protein families were identified. These included 13 novel peptide families n...
Article
Full-text available
Predatory robber flies (Diptera, Asilidae) have been suspected to be venomous due to their ability to overpower well-defended prey. However, details of their venom composition and toxin arsenal remained unknown. Here, we provide a detailed characterization of the venom system of robber flies through the application of comparative transcriptomics, p...
Article
Full-text available
Tong et al. comment on the accuracy of the dating analysis presented in our work on the phylogeny of insects and provide a reanalysis of our data. They replace log-normal priors with uniform priors and add a "roachoid" fossil as a calibration point. Although the reanalysis provides an interesting alternative viewpoint, we maintain that our choices...
Article
Full-text available
Venomics research is being revolutionized by the increased use of sensitive -omics techniques to identify venom toxins and their transcripts in both well studied and neglected venomous taxa. The study of neglected venomous taxa is necessary both for understanding the full diversity of venom systems that have evolved in the animal kingdom, and to ro...
Article
Full-text available
Insects are the most speciose group of animals, but the phylogenetic relationships of many major lineages remain unresolved. We inferred the phylogeny of insects from 1478 protein-coding genes. Phylogenomic analyses of nucleotide and amino acid sequences, with site-specific nucleotide or domain-specific amino acid substitution models, produced stat...
Article
Full-text available
Glycerids are marine annelids commonly known as bloodworms. Bloodworms have an eversible proboscis adorned with jaws connected to venom glands. Bloodworms prey on invertebrates, and it is known that the venom glands produce compounds that can induce toxic effects in animals. Yet, none of these putative toxins has been characterized on a molecular b...
Article
Full-text available
Sets of sequence data used in phylogenetic analysis are often plagued by both random noise and systematic biases. Since the commonly used methods of phylogenetic reconstruction are designed to produce trees it is an important task to evaluate these trees a posteriori. Preferably, however, one would like to assess the suitability of the input data f...
Chapter
Phylogenetic analyses based on large molecular data sets are reviewed, including results of the ‘Deep Metazoan Phylogeny’ project. The phylogeny of Crustacea is still little understood and tree topologies based on molecular data are not congruent with many other morphological data especially for deeper nodes. Earlier analyses using DNA data were no...
Article
Full-text available
Character matrices with extensive missing data are frequently used in phylogenomics with potentially detrimental effects on the accuracy and robustness of tree inference. Therefore, many investigators select taxa and genes with high data coverage. Drawbacks of these selections are their exclusive reliance on data coverage without consideration of a...
Article
Full-text available
Tick salivary gland (SG) proteins possess powerful pharmacologic properties that facilitate tick feeding and pathogen transmission. For the first time, SG transcriptomes of Ixodes ricinus, an important disease vector for humans and animals, were analyzed using next-generation sequencing. SGs were collected from different tick life stages fed on var...
Article
Full-text available
Background Remipedia were initially seen as a primitive taxon within Pancrustacea based on characters considered ancestral, such as the homonomously segmented trunk. Meanwhile, several morphological and molecular studies proposed a more derived position of Remipedia within Pancrustacea, including a sister group relationship to Hexapoda. Because of...
Article
About 2800 mitochondrial genomes of Metazoa are present in NCBI RefSeq today, two thirds belonging to vertebrates. Metazoan phylogeny was recently challenged by large scale EST approaches (phylogenomics), stabilizing classical nodes while simultaneously supporting new sister group hypotheses. The use of mitochondrial data in deep phylogeny analyses...
Article
Full-text available
Patterns of common recolonization routes from glacial refugia to Central Europe during the Pleistocene are generalized to paradigms of postglacial recolonization in Europe. Recent studies indicate, however, that the actual phylogeographic history of many species might be more complex and cannot be simplified to generalized patterns. Burnet moths of...
Article
Molecular sequences do not only allow the reconstruction of phylogenetic relationships among species, but also provide information on the approximate divergence times. Whereas the fossil record dates the origin of most multicellular animal phyla during the Cambrian explosion less than 540 million years ago(mya), molecular clock calculations usually...
Chapter
With more than a million species that have already been described, the hexapods (insects and allies) constitute the largest animal group. Still their origin and phylogenetic affinities are matter of intense debate. Although previous morphological work generally considered the millipedes as sister taxon of the hexapods, molecular phylogenetic analys...
Article
Full-text available
Arthropods were the first animals to conquer land and air. They encompass more than three quarters of all described living species. This extraordinary evolutionary success is based on an astoundingly wide array of highly adaptive body organizations. A lack of robustly resolved phylogenetic relationships, however, currently impedes the reliable reco...
Data
Table S1. Detailed analyses results. Detailed results including lists of the percentage of remained positions after alignment masking per data set and alignment method. Given are all considered clades and corresponding bootstrap values (>50%) per data set, alignment method and (un)masked approach as well as all Neighbor-Net graphs.
Article
Full-text available
Methods of alignment masking, which refers to the technique of excluding alignment blocks prior to tree reconstructions, have been successful in improving the signal-to-noise ratio in sequence alignments. However, the lack of formally well defined methods to identify randomness in sequence alignments has prevented a routine application of alignment...
Article
Higher-level arthropod phylogenetics is an intensely active field of research, not least as a result of the hegemony of molecular data. However, not all areas of arthropod phylogenetics have so far received equal attention. The application of molecular data to infer a comprehensive phylogeny of Crustacea is still in its infancy, and several emergin...
Thesis
Full-text available
A key role in arthropod phylogeny plays a group of organisms that was already in the focus of taxonomic research of Charles Darwin in the mid of the 19th century, namely the Crustacea. This extremely divers group comprises small species like the Mystacocarida (Derocheilocaris typicus) with only 0.3 mm body size or such big representatives like the...