Biography

Markus Göker received his PhD in 2003 and his habilitation in 2008 at the University of Tübingen. Since 2008 he is employed at the Leibniz Institute DSMZ in the areas of phylogenomics and nomenclature.

Markus Göker has published several hundreds of peer-reviewed papers together with several hundreds of distinct coauthors and was Web of Science Highly Cited Researcher in 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023 and received the Bergey Award in Recognition of Outstanding Contributions to Bacterial Systematics in 2023. He currently acts as principal investigator of three large-scale genome-sequencing projects, conducted as a collaboration between the DOE-JGI and the DSMZ, each targetting 1000 bacterial or archaeal type strains, particularly Actinobacteria, Bacteroidetes and Rhodobacteraceae. He currently also acts as Secretary of the Judicial Commission of the International Committee on Systematics of Prokaryotes (ICSP) and contributes to its publications, particularly regarding the International Code of Nomenclature of Prokaryotes (ICNP), and as List Editor of the International Journal of Systematic and Evolutionary Microbiology.

Methodologically, Markus Göker was mainly interested in using information from whole genome sequences to infer phylogenies, to elucidate the evolution of genomic and phenotypic features and to link genomics and ecology using high-throughput phylogenetic comparative methods. He has now also a keen interest in bioinformatic solutions for collecting, integrating, checking and displaying genomic, taxonomic and nomenclatural information. Web services and software published by him or his group include:

• Nomenclature of prokaryotes: https://lpsn.dsmz.de/; https://api.lpsn.dsmz.de/
• Genome-based phylogeny and classification of prokaryotes: https://tygs.dsmz.de/
• Digital DNA:DNA hybridization (comparative genome analysis for microbial taxonomists): https://ggdc.dsmz.de/
• Virus phylogeny and classification: https://victor.dsmz.de/
• Statistical analysis of phenotype microarray data: http://opm.dsmz.de/

Markus Göker is an expert programmer in Ruby, R, SQL (PostgreSQL), git, Bash, awk, sed, m4 and other Linux command-line tools. He has routinely applied Julia, Ada, Tcl, database and system administration, HTML/CSS, Shiny, Slurm, project management, and continuous integration with automated tests, and has occasionally used Python, PHP, Fortran, Crystal, SQLite, MySQL, and SVN. Routinely applied were high-performance and high-throughput computing, genome sequence annotation, homolog/ortholog detection, sequence alignment, phylogenetic inference, analysis and manipulation of trees, cophylogenetics, machine learning tools like naïve Bayesian filters and random forests, and countless text processing tools.