Markus Ankenbrand

University of Wuerzburg | JMU · Center for Computational and Theoretical Biology

Cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) imaging allows precise non-invasive quantification of cardiac function. It requires reliable image segmentation for myocardial tissue. Clinically used software usually offers automatic approaches for this step. These are, however, designed for segmentation of human images obtained at clinical field strengths. They r...

One of the most critical steps for accurate taxonomic identification in DNA (meta)-barcoding is to have an accurate DNA reference sequence dataset for the marker of choice. Therefore, developing such a dataset has been a long-term ambition, especially in the Viridiplantae kingdom. Typically, reference datasets are constructed with sequences downloa...

Young grapevines (Vitis vinifera) suffer and eventually can die from the crown gall disease caused by the plant pathogen Allorhizobium vitis (Rhizobiaceae). Virulent members of A. vitis harbor a tumor-inducing plasmid and induce formation of crown galls due to the oncogenes encoded on the transfer DNA. The expression of oncogenes in transformed hos...

Cell lineage decisions occur in three-dimensional spatial patterns that are difficult to identify by eye. There is an ongoing effort to replicate such patterns using mathematical modeling. One approach uses long ranging cell-cell communication to replicate common spatial arrangements like checkerboard and engulfing patterns. In this model, the cell...

Young grapevines (Vitis vinifera) suffer and eventually can die from the crown gall (CG) disease caused by the plant pathogen Allorhizobium vitis (Rhizobiaceae). Virulent members of A. vitis harbour a tumor-inducing (Ti) plasmid and induce formation of crown galls (CGs) due to the oncogenes encoded on the transfer-DNA (T-DNA). Expression of oncogen...

Assessment of myocardial viability is essential in diagnosis and treatment management of patients suffering from myocardial infarction, and classification of pathology on the myocardium is the key to this assessment. This work defines a new task of medical image analysis, i.e., to perform myocardial pathology segmentation (MyoPS) combining three-se...

Horizontal gene transfer accelerates microbial evolution. The marine picocyanobacterium Prochlorococcus exhibits high genomic plasticity, yet the underlying mechanisms are elusive. Here, we report a novel family of DNA transposons-"tycheposons"-some of which are viral satellites while others carry cargo, such as nutrient-acquisition genes, which sh...

Cell lineage decisions occur in three-dimensional spatial patterns that are difficult to identify by eye. There is an ongoing effort to replicate such patterns using mathematical modeling. One approach uses long ranging cell-cell communication to replicate common spatial arrangements like checkerboard and engulfing patterns. In this model, the cell...

Traits have become a crucial part of ecological and evolutionary sciences, helping researchers understand the function of an organism's morphology, physiology, growth and life history, with effects on fitness, behaviour, interactions with the environment and ecosystem processes. However, measuring, compiling and analysing trait data comes with data...

The negative impact of juvenile undernourishment on adult behavior has been well reported for vertebrates, but relatively little is known about invertebrates. In honeybees, nutrition has long been known to affect task performance and timing of behavioral transitions. Whether and how a dietary restriction during larval development affects the task p...

Motivation: Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) are an integral tool for studying the architecture of complex genotype and phenotype relationships. Linear mixed models (LMMs) are commonly used to detect associations between genetic markers and a trait of interest, while at the same time allowing to account for population structure and cryptic r...

Motivation Genome-wide Association Studies (GWAS) are an integral tool for studying the architecture of complex genotype and phenotype relationships. Linear Mixed Models (LMMs) are commonly used to detect associations between genetic markers and the trait of interest, while at the same time allowing to account for population structure and cryptic r...

Assessment of myocardial viability is essential in diagnosis and treatment management of patients suffering from myocardial infarction, and classification of pathology on myocardium is the key to this assessment. This work defines a new task of medical image analysis, i.e., to perform myocardial pathology segmentation (MyoPS) combining three-sequen...

In vitro rearing of honeybee larvae is an established method that enables exact control and monitoring of developmental factors and allows controlled application of pesticides or pathogens. However, only a few studies have investigated how the rearing method itself affects the behavior of the resulting adult honeybees. We raised honeybees in vitro...

Purpose Image acquisition and subsequent manual analysis of cardiac cine MRI is time‐consuming. The purpose of this study was to train and evaluate a 3D artificial neural network for semantic segmentation of radially undersampled cardiac MRI to accelerate both scan time and postprocessing. Methods A database of Cartesian short‐axis MR images of th...

Individual‐based models are doubly complex: as well as representing complex ecological systems, the software that implements them is complex in itself. Both forms of complexity must be managed to create reliable models. However, the ecological modelling literature to date has focussed almost exclusively on the biological complexity. Here, we discus...

“Bee pollen” is pollen collected from flowers by honey bees. It is used by the bees to nourish themselves, mainly by providing royal jelly and brood food, but it is also used for human nutrition. For the latter purpose, it is collected at the hive entrance as pellets that the bees bring to the hive. Bee pollen has diverse bioactivities, and thus ha...

Introduction Cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) at ultrahigh field (UHF) offers the potential of high resolution and fast image acquisition. Both technical and physiological challenges associated with CMR at 7T require specific hardware and pulse sequences. This study aimed to assess the current status and existing, publicly available technology rega...

Purpose To fully automatically derive quantitative parameters from late gadolinium enhancement (LGE) cardiac MR (CMR) in patients with myocardial infarction and to investigate if phase sensitive or magnitude reconstructions or a combination of both results in best segmentation accuracy. Methods In this retrospective single center study, a convolut...

Due to the increasing availability of public bacterial genome data and cost efficiency of novel bacterial strain sequencing, phylogenetic analyses based on more than a single or few marker genes have become feasible. In this method protocol, we describe the complete bioinformatic workflow from raw genomic data to final phylogenetic analyses based o...

Purpose Artificial neural networks show promising performance in automatic segmentation of cardiac MRI. However, training requires large amounts of annotated data and generalization to different vendors, field strengths, sequence parameters, and pathologies is limited. Transfer learning addresses this challenge, but specific recommendations regardi...

Background Image segmentation is a common task in medical imaging e.g., for volumetry analysis in cardiac MRI. Artificial neural networks are used to automate this task with performance similar to manual operators. However, this performance is only achieved in the narrow tasks networks are trained on. Performance drops dramatically when data charac...

Horizontal gene transfer accelerates microbial evolution, promoting diversification and adaptation. The globally abundant marine cyanobacterium Prochlorococcus has a highly streamlined genome with frequent gene exchange reflected in its extensive pangenome. The source of its genomic variability, however, remains elusive since most cells lack the co...

We tested different loss functions and hyper-parameters using a 2D U-Net architecture (resnet34 backbone) with five-fold cross-validation on the training data. Pathology specific sequence data (e.g. LGE for scar and T2 for edema) was used as a sole input for training and in combination with all sequences. We wanted to address the question whether f...

Background Image segmentation is a common task in medical imaging e.g. for volumetry analysis in cardiac MRI. Artificial neural networks are used to automate this task with performance similar to manual operators. However, this performance is only achieved in the narrow tasks networks are trained on. Performance drops dramatically when data charact...

Background: Chloroplasts are intracellular organelles that enable plants to conduct photosynthesis. They arose through the symbiotic integration of a prokaryotic cell into an eukaryotic host cell and still contain their own genomes with distinct genomic information. Plastid genomes accommodate essential genes and are regularly utilized in biotechn...

Purpose Inhomogeneities of the static magnetic B0 field are a major limiting factor in cardiac MRI at ultrahigh field (≥ 7T), as they result in signal loss and image distortions. Different magnetic susceptibilities of the myocardium and surrounding tissue in combination with cardiac motion lead to strong spatio‐temporal B0‐field inhomogeneities, an...

Background Artificial neural networks show promising performance in automatic segmentation of cardiac MRI. However, training requires large amounts of annotated data and generalization to different vendors, field strengths, sequence parameters, and pathologies is limited. Transfer learning addresses this challenge, but specific recommendations rega...

Most plants grow and develop by taking up nutrients from the soil while continuously under threat from foraging animals. Carnivorous plants have turned the tables by capturing and consuming nutrient-rich animal prey, enabling them to thrive in nutrient-poor soil. To better understand the evolution of botanical carnivory, we compared the draft genom...

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

Synthesizing trait observations and knowledge across the Tree of Life remains a grand challenge for biodiversity science. Species traits are widely used in ecological and evolutionary science, and new data and methods have proliferated rapidly. Yet accessing and integrating disparate data sources remains a considerable challenge, slowing progress t...

DNA barcoding and meta-barcoding have become irreplaceable in research and applications, where identification of taxa alone or within a mixture, respectively, becomes relevant. Pioneering studies were in the microbiological context, yet nowadays also plants and animals become targeted. Given the variety of markers used, formatting requirements for...

Honeybees Apis mellifera and other pollinating insects suffer from pesticides in agricultural landscapes. Flupyradifurone is the active ingredient of a novel pesticide by the name of ‘Sivanto’, introduced by Bayer AG (Crop Science Division, Monheim am Rhein, Germany). It is recommended against sucking insects and marketed as ‘harmless’ to honeybees...

Motivation Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) are one of the most commonly used methods to detect associations between complex traits and genomic polymorphisms. As both genotyping and phenotyping of large populations has become easier, typical modern GWAS have to cope with massive amounts of data. Thus, the computational demand for these analys...

Solitary bees build their nests by modifying the interior of natural cavities, and they provision them with food by importing collected pollen. As a result, the microbiota of the solitary bee nests may be highly dependent on introduced materials. In order to investigate how the collected pollen is associated with the nest microbiota, we used metaba...

DNA barcoding and meta-barcoding have become irreplaceable in research and applications, where identification of taxa alone or within a mixture, respectively, becomes relevant. Pioneering studies were in the microbiological context, yet nowadays also plants and animals become targeted. Given the variety of markers used, formatting requirements for...

Chloroplasts are photosynthetic organelles in plant cells and contain their own genomic information. That genome can be utilized in different scientific fields like phylogenetics or biotechnology. Thus, different assemblers have been developed specialized in chloroplast assemblies. Those assemblers often use the output of whole genome sequencing ex...

Synthesising trait observations and knowledge across the Tree of Life remains a grand challenge for biodiversity science. Despite the well-recognised importance of traits for addressing ecological and evolutionary questions, trait-based approaches still struggle with several basic data requirements to deliver openly accessible, reproducible, and tr...

In previous studies, the gram-positive firmicute genus Paenibacillus was found with significant abundances in nests of wild solitary bees. Paenibacillus larvae is well-known for beekeepers as a severe pathogen causing the fatal honey bee disease American foulbrood, and other members of the genus are either secondary invaders of European foulbrood o...

Species composition assessment of ecological communities and networks is an important aspect of biodiversity research. Yet often ecological traits of organisms in a community are more informative than scientific names only. Furthermore, other properties like threat status, invasiveness, or human usage are relevant for many studies, but cannot be ev...

Species composition assessment of ecological communities and networks is an important aspect of biodiversity research. Yet often ecological traits of organisms in a community are more informative than scientific names only. Furthermore, other properties like threat status, invasiveness, or human usage are relevant to many studies, but cannot be eva...

We report here the draft genome of Klebsiella sp. strain C31, a bacterial isolate from the North Selangor peat swamp forest in Malaysia. The putative genes for the biogeochemical processes of the genome were annotated and investigated.

We report the draft genome sequence of a bacterial isolate, Paraburkholderia sp. strain C35, which was isolated from a Malaysian tropical peat swamp forest. The putative genes for the biogeochemical processes were annotated and are publicly available in the online databases. We report the draft genome sequence of a bacterial isolate, Paraburkholder...

New experimental methods have drastically accelerated the pace and quantity at which biological data is generated. High-throughput DNA sequencing is one of the pivotal new technologies. It offers a number of novel applications in various fields of biology, including ecology, evolution, and genomics. However, together with those opportunities many n...

Whole genome alignments and comparative analysis are key methods in the quest of unraveling the dynamics of genome evolution. Interactive visualization and exploration of the generated alignments, annotations, and phylogenetic data are important steps in the interpretation of the initial results. Limitations of existing software inspired us to deve...

Whole genome alignments and comparative analysis are key methods in the quest of unraveling the dynamics of genome evolution. Interactive visualization and exploration of the generated alignments, annotations, and phylogenetic data are important steps in the interpretation of the initial results. Limitations of existing software inspired us to deve...

Whole genome alignments and comparative analysis are key methods in the quest of unraveling the dynamics of genome evolution. Interactive visualization and exploration of the generated alignments, annotations, and phylogenetic data are important steps in the interpretation of the initial results. Limitations of existing software inspired us to deve...

The Biological Observation Matrix (BIOM) format is widely used to store data from high-throughput studies. It aims at increasing interoperability of bioinformatic tools that process this data. However, due to multiple versions and implementation details, working with this format can be tricky. Currently, libraries in Python, R and Perl are availabl...

RNA sequencing (RNA-seq) has become a powerful tool to understand molecular mechanisms and/or developmental programs. It provides a fast, reliable and cost-effective method to access sets of expressed elements in a qualitative and quantitative manner. Especially for non-model organisms and in absence of a reference genome, RNA-seq data is used to r...

The Biological Observation Matrix (BIOM) format is widely used to store data from high-throughput studies. It aims at increasing interoperability of bioinformatic tools that process this data. However, due to multiple versions and implementation details, working with this format can be tricky. Currently, libraries in Python, R and Perl are availabl...

Nowadays, information about the identity and expression levels of genes are often retrieved by RNA-sequencing (RNA-seq). One of its major challenges is gaining biologically meaningful information from the vast amount of short read data. Therefore, tools for assembly and quantification have been developed. Still, the problem remains, that their resu...

Whole genome alignments and comparative analysis are key methods in the quest of unraveling the dynamics of genome evolution. Interactive visualization and exploration of the generated alignments, annotations, and phylogenetic data are important steps in the interpretation of the initial results. Limitations of existing software inspired us to deve...

Although the concept of botanical carnivory has been known since Darwin's time, the molecular mechanisms that allow animal feeding remain unknown, primarily due to a complete lack of genomic information. Here, we show that the transcriptomic landscape of the Dionaea trap is dramatically shifted toward signal transduction and nutrient transport upon...

The need for multi-gene analyses in scientific fields such as phylogenetics and DNA barcoding has increased in recent years. In particular, these approaches are increasingly important for differentiating bacterial species, where reliance on the standard 16S rDNA marker can result in poor resolution. Additionally, the assembly of bacterial genomes h...

Taxon identification is one of the fundamental challenges in biological research. Usually, classifications are based on specimen morphology, sometimes supported by their behaviour, ecology or biochemistry. Technological advances now allow using genomic fragments as a taxon barcode. With the latest developments of high-throughput sequencers this can...

The internal transcribed spacer 2 (ITS2) is a well established marker for phylogenetic analyses in eukaryotes. A reliable resource for reference sequences and their secondary structures is the ITS2 database (http://its2.bioapps.biozentrum.uni-wuerzburg.de/). However, the database was last updated in 2011. Here we present a major update of the under...

One of the main tasks in current genomics is comparing complete genomes of different organisms. For this task specialized whole genome alignment programs have been developed. Yet results of established tools are not easily comprehensible as they often consist of large tables of coordinates. In contrast graphical representations of alignments vastly...

Background The internal transcribed spacer 2 (ITS2) is a well-established marker for DNA barcoding, especially for plants and fungi. Yet so far, no specific reference database exists dedicated to this purpose. Extracting ITS2 sequences for a taxonomic group from GenBank is tedious manual work, which is prone to errors due to misannotations. The sam...

Background Meta-barcoding of mixed pollen samples constitutes a suitable alternative to conventional pollen identification via light microscopy. Current approaches however have limitations in practicability due to low sample throughput and/or inefficient processing methods, e.g. separate steps for amplification and sample indexing. Results We thus...