Research Team Dilthey

The Research Group Dilthey works at the interface between new sequencing technologies, bioinformatics and statistical modeling, and applications in diagnostics and basic research.

Our research contributes to harnessing the enormous technological advances in genome sequencing technology for the generation of biomedical knowledge.

Important goals of our current research are

to develop methods for accurate immuno-genotyping of human genomes, apply them to the largest human genome cohorts (e.g. UK Biobank, with approximately 500,000 subjects enrolled), and use them to gain new insights into, for example, the genetic basis of autoimmune diseases;
to explore the characterization of the relationship between the human microbiome and human health, especially in the field of hematological-oncological diseases;
to develop new methods for faster diagnosis of sepsis, in particular via rapid sequencing of cell-free DNA ("liquid biopsy");
to explore the variability of microbial genomes, especially in the field of mobile genetic elements (MGEs) and genome evolution;
to develop new systems ("Integrated Genomic Surveillance") that combine viral genome sequencing with contact tracing to enable high-resolution investigation of the infection chains of SARS-CoV-2 and other pathogens and
to develop bioinformatics methods, particularly for graph genomes and metagenomic sequencing.

If you are interested in bachelor, master or PhD projects, please contact us; a prerequisite for working in our group is existing knowledge or at least a strong interest plus motivation for self-study in bioinformatics, statistical modeling and/or computational biology.