Research

I have recently finished my PhD at the ITB within the group of Prof. Peter Hammerstein with a summa cum laude grade. My research is funded by the DFG as part of the SFB 618: Robustness, Modularity and Evolutionary Design of Living Systems.

My main interest is with the intracellular bacterium Wolbachia, probably the most abundant endosymbiont on this planet (disregarding mitochondria and plastids, that is) as it presumably infects more than 60% of all insect species.

Because Wolbachia's mode of transmission is strictly maternal (i.e. via egg cytoplasm), finding itself in a male host boils down to being trapped in terms of further reproduction or spread. This is why evolution has ''enabled'' Wolbachia to manipulate its hosts' reproduction in various ways all of which more or less directly increase the frequency of infected females within a host population. The most common of these manipulations is referred to as cytoplasmic incompatibility (CI), and renders the sperm of infected males incompatible with uninfected eggs. Infected eggs, though, remain compatible both with sperm from infected as well as uninfected males. The result is that if Wolbachia is prevalent enough, infected females have an advantage over uninfected females, and the infection spreads.

I am working with systems of coupled recursion equations that describe Wolbachia dynamics together with simple host population genetics in order to investigate how CI affects gene flow between neighboring host populations and how it might influence (parapatric) speciation processes of the host. For some special cases, analytical approaches are possible, but generally, the analysis of the model is only feasible by means of numerical simulations. These simulations are programmed in the great script language of Python where I heavily rely on the scientific python package, SciPy, and an enhanced python shell, IPython.

Background

I hold a diploma degree in Biophysics (Diplom-Biophysiker) from the Humboldt University Berlin where I specialized on theoretical biophysics (mathematical modeling of biological organisms on the cellular and sub-cellular level) and sniffed even more mathematical and physical odor during courses on dynamical systems (stochastic processes and nonlinear dynamics) at the physics department of the Humboldt University.

Publications

Peer reviewed articles

• Dannowski J, Flor M, Telschow A, and Hammerstein P. 2009. The effect of sibmating on the infection dynamics of male-killing bacteria. Evolution 63: 2525-2534. [10.1111/j.1558-5646.2009.00749.x] [Submitted version]
• Telschow A, Flor M, Kobayashi Y, Hammerstein P, and Werren J. 2007. Wolbachia-induced unidirec­tional cytoplasmic incompatibility and speciation: Mainland-island model. PLoS ONE 2: e701. [doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0000701]
• Flor M, Hammerstein P, and Telschow A. 2007. Wolbachia-induced unidirectional cyto­plasmic incompatibility and the stability of infecti­on polymorphism in parapatric host populations. J. Evol. Biol. 20: 696-706. [doi:10.1111/j.1420-9101.2006.01252.x]

PhD thesis

Posters

Privat interests

In my spare time, I love to spend time with my son and watch him conquer the world. I also like to listen to radio plays (current and old time ones), play the great sport of Ultimate Frisbee, occasionaly some Volleyball, hop on my bicycle, or just read marvellous books such as Life of Pi by Yann Martel or The Baroque Cycle by Neal Stephenson.