International Max Planck Research School for Genome Science

Dönitz, Jürgen, Dr.

Group leader of the group Knowledge Management of the Institute of Medical Bioinformatics


  • 2003 –2013 Bioinformatician at the Inst. of Bioinformatics
  • 2012 –2018 Bioinformatician at the Dept. of Developmental Biology
  • 2013 – 2016 SoftwaKnowledge Managementre developer at the State and University Library Göttingen
  • PhD thesis completed “Development and application of ontologies for biological applications”
  • since 2019 Postdoc at the Dept. of Evolutionary Developmental Genetics
  • since 2019 Leader of the group Knowledge Management of the Institute of Medical Bioinformatics




Major Research Interests

The way to process data differs between human and machines. While human have an advantage of interpretation data in some context, machines have no difficulties working on large amounts of data. The group “Knowledge Management” aims at combining these two views in different topics, ranging from developmental biology to medical research. We analyze data and define data models to describe the specific knowledge domain and implement (micro-) services and applications to make the data available to machines as well as to humans for further processing. These often includes the usage of ontologies and methods of the semantic web and different programming languages.

Homepage Department / Research Group

https://bioinformatics.umg.eu/research/workgroups/knowledge-management/




Selected Recent Publications


  • Dönitz J, Gerischer L, Hahnke S, Pfeiffer S, Bucher G. Expanded and updated data and a query pipeline for iBeetle-Base. Nucleic Acids Res. 2018;46:D831–5.

  • Wingender E, Schoeps T, Haubrock M, Krull M, Dönitz J. TFClass: expanding the classification of human transcription factors to their mammalian orthologs. Nucleic Acids Res. 2018;46:D343–7.

  • Nemajerova A, Kramer D, Siller SS, Herr C, Shomroni O, Pena T, et al. TAp73 is a central transcriptional regulator of airway multiciliogenesis. Genes Dev. 2016;30:1300–12.

  • Ulrich J, Dao VA, Majumdar U, Schmitt-Engel C, Schwirz J, Schultheis D, et al. Large scale RNAi screen in Tribolium reveals novel target genes for pest control and the proteasome as prime target. BMC Genomics. 2015;16. doi:10.1186/s12864-015-1880-y.

  • Schmitt-Engel C, Schultheis D, Schwirz J, Ströhlein N, Troelenberg N, Majumdar U, et al. The iBeetle large-scale RNAi screen reveals gene functions for insect development and physiology. Nat Commun. 2015;6:7822.

  • Dönitz J, Schmitt-Engel C, Grossmann D, Gerischer L, Tech M, Schoppmeier M, et al. iBeetle-Base: a database for RNAi phenotypes in the red flour beetle Tribolium castaneum. Nucleic Acids Res. 2015;43:D720–5.