Dr. Volker Matys
Drawing on his expertise in molecular biology and data processing, Volker has contributed to the transcription factor database TRANSFAC for over two decades in a range of capacities, beginning as a database curator and editor, followed by quality control, and currently serving in customer support.
Profile
Volker Matys is a molecular biologist with twenty-seven years of professional experience as a content scientist in bioinformatics, specializing in gene regulation. He has extensive expertise in the development, testing, and documentation of bioinformatics resources, particularly the transcription factor database TRANSFAC. Throughout his career at BIOBASE GmbH, QIAGEN GmbH and geneXplain GmbH, he worked in global teams, contributing to planning and quality assurance of new product developments. His work included in-depth database curation based on primary literature, systematic testing of software and data, and analytical investigation of detected errors to identify their root causes. In addition, he played a key role in training new database curators, including remote training of colleagues in Bangalore, India.
Volker holds a diploma in biology from the University of Freiburg, with advanced studies in genetics, biochemistry, microbiology, as well as data processing and statistics as minor subjects. Volker earned his doctor rerum naturalium (Ph.D. equivalent) from the University of Freiburg, with research conducted at St. George’s Hospital Medical School in London on the expression and function of Epstein–Barr virus–encoded RNA in human cells. During the research for his diploma and doctoral degree, he also worked as a graduate assistant in practical courses of quantitative biology for biology students and biochemistry for medical students in both Germany and the UK. After obtaining his doctoral degree, he gained practical experience in molecular bioinformatics through an internship focused on gene regulation, where he developed Perl scripts for database indexing before joining BIOBASE Gmbh as database curator and editor.
Selected Publications
1. Kaplun, A., Krull, M., Lakshman, K., Matys, V., Lewicki, B., & Hogan, J. D. (2016). Establishing and validating regulatory regions for variant annotation and expression analysis. BMC genomics, 17 Suppl 2(Suppl 2), 393. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12864-016-2724-0
2. Matys, V., Kel-Margoulis, O. V., Fricke, E., Liebich, I., Land, S., Barre-Dirrie, A., Reuter, I., Chekmenev, D., Krull, M., Hornischer, K., Voss, N., Stegmaier, P., Lewicki-Potapov, B., Saxel, H., Kel, A. E., & Wingender, E. (2006). TRANSFAC and its module TRANSCompel: transcriptional gene regulation in eukaryotes. Nucleic acids research, 34(Database issue), D108–D110. https://doi.org/10.1093/nar/gkj143
3. Matys, V., Fricke, E., Geffers, R., Gössling, E., Haubrock, M., Hehl, R., Hornischer, K., Karas, D., Kel, A. E., Kel-Margoulis, O. V., Kloos, D. U., Land, S., Lewicki-Potapov, B., Michael, H., Münch, R., Reuter, I., Rotert, S., Saxel, H., Scheer, M., Thiele, S., … Wingender, E. (2003). TRANSFAC: transcriptional regulation, from patterns to profiles. Nucleic acids research, 31(1), 374–378. https://doi.org/10.1093/nar/gkg108