Wojciech Karlowski

Karlowski graduated in molecular biology from the Faculty of Biology at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan in 1991.[1] As a part of his education, he completed a 3-month internship within the IAESTE program in the laboratory of prof. L. Jaenicke in the Institute of Biochemistry at the University of Cologne.

From 1991 to 1996 Karlowski continued his education in the area of plant molecular genetics in the frame of the Adam Mickiewicz University Ph.D. School. His research concentrated on molecular mechanisms of symbiotic nitrogen fixation of leguminous plants. He defended his Ph.D. dissertation “Genes encoding nodule-specific proline-rich proteins from yellow lupine” in 1996 under the supervision of prof. Andrzej B. Legocki.[1]

Karłowski completed his postdoctoral fellowship in the laboratory of prof. Ann Hirsch in the Institute of Molecular, Cell and Developmental Biology at the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA) from 1997 to 2000. He was conducting experiments related to molecular aspects of symbiotic interactions between leguminous plants and bacteria, including characterization of a novel gene identified in alfalfa (Medicago sativa) mutant blocked at the early stages of symbiotic nodules development.[3]

Between 2001 and 2004 Karlowski worked as a Scientist in the group of dr. Klaus F. X. Mayer in the Institute of Bioinformatics/Munich Information Center for Protein Sequences (MIPS) in Munich.[4][5][6] He was involved in research on computational genomics of plants in a collaboration with Arizona Genomics Institute, Whitehead Institute MIT, and Rutgers University. One of his most important scientific achievements during that time was related to a bioinformatic analysis of data generated during the early stages of corn (Zea mays) genome sequencing. A novel approach and application of advanced computational biology techniques to the project allowed the first view at the composition and evolutionary history of the corn genome.[7]

In 2004 Karlowski took a position at the Faculty of Biology at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan. In 2007 he completed a 3-month internship at the University in Perpignan in France within the Marie Curie Host Fellowships for the Transfer of Knowledge program. At this time, he started a scientific project dedicated to a bioinformatic analysis of protein domains involved in silencing of transcription in a collaboration with dr. Thierry Lagrange.[8][9] In 2008 Wojciech Karlowski was appointed as a visiting professor at the University of Perpignan and collaborated with prof. Manuel Echeverria on the functional characterization of miRNA in rice.[10] In the same year, the Faculty of Biology Council awarded him with the habilitation degree (D. Sc) in biology.[1] In 2009 Wojciech Karlowski was nominated as an associate professor in the Laboratory of Bioinformatics at the Adam Mickiewicz University and he established his research group that worked on projects related to genomics, biological data analysis, and non-coding RNAs.

In 2014 Karlowski received a nomination of a professor in biological sciences from the President of the Republic of Poland.[2] In the same year, he took the position of professor at the Faculty of Biology at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan and established the Department of Computational Biology. His research group works on scientific projects related to the exploration of biological data. They investigate the properties of biological processes using computational tools and employ high-throughput methods for comparative, functional, and evolutionary molecular biology analyses.[11][12][13][14][15]

Wojciech Karlowski is an expert in bioinformatics, molecular biology, molecular genetics, and genomics. He is an author and co-author of numerous publications in international journals.[16][17][18] Among some of his best achievements are:

• Zielezinski A, Girgis HZ, Bernard G, Leimeister CA, Tang K, Dencker T, Lau AK, Röhling S, Choi JJ, Waterman MS, Comin M, Kim SH, Vinga S, Almeida JS, Chan CX, James BT, Sun F, Morgenstern B, Karlowski WM. Benchmarking of alignment-free sequence comparison methods. Genome Biol. 2019 Jul 25;20(1):144. doi: 10.1186/s13059-019-1755-7.[12]
• Zielezinski A, Karlowski WM. Integrative data analysis indicates an intrinsic disordered domain character of Argonaute-binding motifs. Bioinformatics. 2015 Feb 1;31(3):332-9. doi: 10.1093/bioinformatics/btu666.[13]
• Karlowski WM, Zielezinski A, Carrère J, Pontier D, Lagrange T, Cooke R. Genome-wide computational identification of WG/GW Argonaute-binding proteins in Arabidopsis. Nucleic Acids Res. 2010 Jul;38(13):4231-45. doi: 10.1093/nar/gkq162.[8]
• Messing J, Bharti AK, Karlowski WM, Gundlach H, Kim HR, Yu Y, Wei F, Fuks G, Soderlund CA, Mayer KF, Wing RA. Sequence composition and genome organization of maize. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2004 Oct 5;101(40):14349-54. doi: 10.1073/pnas.0406163101.[7]
• Shiu SH, Karlowski WM, Pan R, Tzeng YH, Mayer KF, Li WH. Comparative analysis of the receptor-like kinase family in Arabidopsis and rice. Plant Cell. 2004 May;16(5):1220-34. doi: 10.1105/tpc.020834.[4]
• Karlowski WM, Hirsch AM. The over-expression of an alfalfa RING-H2 gene induces pleiotropic effects on plant growth and development. Plant Mol Biol. 2003 May;52(1):121-33. doi: 10.1023/a:1023916701669[3]

• Wojciech Karlowski publications indexed by Google Scholar