A large and internationally renowned plant research institute in Gatersleben, Germany. Our basic, application oriented and interdisciplinary research seeks to collect new knowledge and to find new technologies aiming at the extensive use of plant genetic resources for optimised nutrient production and environmentally friendly agriculture. With the central ex situ gene bank, IPK possesses a unique collection of plant genetic resources from more than 3,000 botanic species of about 800 different genera. Our stock currently totals approximately 147,000 specimens. This set is one most comprehensive collection worldwide and provides a major contribution to the prevention of extinction (genetic erosion) of both cultivated plants and their related wild species. As an international information centre for taxonomy of cultivated plants, the IPK Genebank possesses comprehensive reference collections including a herbarium with more than 390,000 samples. Furthermore the IPK is part of international grasses sequencing consortia ETGI (http://www.etgi.org) and IBSC (http://www.barleygenome.org). Within these activities the IPK coordinates the BARLEX project (Exploring the Barley Genome: Anchoring the barley physical map by explorative genomic sequencing).

The Bioinformatics at IPK comprises six research groups involved in a wide range of local, national and international research projects and information networks as well as in Bioinformatics education at universities, covering a wide range of aspects of integrative bioinformatics and systems biology in general and plant bioinformatics in particular. State-of-the-art computational techniques enable the detailed representation and analysis of data ranging from high-throughput molecular biological experiments to phenotypical and environmental data. Dr. Uwe Scholz is Group Leader of the research group Bioinformatics and Information Technology. The scientific work of the applicant is dedicated to development of molecular biological databases and data integration of different data domains, e.g. sequence, marker, transcript, metabolic or phenotypic information (GABI BARLEX, GABI GENOBAR, BIOENERGY2021 OPTIMAS). Sequence analysis is one research interest. Here exist experiences in the assembly of next-generation sequencing data from plant genomes (GABI BARLEX) as well as transcript based sequences (GABI RYE-EXPRESS). The prediction of markers especially single nucleotide polymorphism is in the research focus (GABI RYE-EXPRESS, Plant-KBBE Cornfed).

Selected Publications
Lange M et al. (2010) The LAILAPS Search Engine: A Feature Model for Relevance Ranking in Life Science Databases. Journal of Integrative Bioinformatics, 7(3):e118.
Mayer KFX et al. (2009) Gene content and virtual gene order of barley chromosome 1H. Plant Physiology, 151(2):496-505.
Steuernagel B et al. (2009) De novo 454 sequencing of barcoded BAC pools for comprehensive gene survey and genome analysis in the complex genome of barley. BMC Genomics 10 547.
Grafahrend-Belau E et al. (2008) MetaCrop: a detailed database of crop plant metabolism. Nucleic Acids Research, 36(suppl 1):D954–D958.
Weise S et al. (2006) Meta-All: a system for managing metabolic pathway information. BMC Bioinformatics, 7(1):e465.