dr. A (Anne) Kupczok

I am an assistant professor in the Bioinformatics group since August 2020. I am a bioinformatician by training with a particular interest how microbes and viruses evolve and how the interaction with eukaryotic hosts impact their evolution. My research focus is evolutionary (meta-)genomics, that is, the inference of population genetic processes in microorganisms from genomic and metagenomic data. Metagenomes represent the genetic content of community members in a specific environment and contain unprecedented information on the genetic variation that exists within all the community members.

In my research, I infer the diversity within microbial populations from genomes and metagenomes, where I focus on the interaction between organisms, such as phages and bacteria, and the consequences of this interaction on genome evolution. I am interested in understanding how different evolutionary processes (mutation, recombination, and horizontal gene transfer) contribute to viral and microbial evolution.