Research group
Research overview
Boas is interested in the evolution of specialised metabolism in plants with a particular focus on the betalain and flavonoid biosynthesis in Caryophyllales. He combines molecular biology and bioinformatics approaches including ONT long read sequencing, genome and transcriptome assembly, comparative genomics, gene expression analysis, and mapping-by-sequencing to address evolutionary questions. Boas is particularly interested how biosynthetic gene clusters are associated with the production of betalains.
Biography
Boas studied Biochemistry at the Heinrich-Heine University Düsseldorf and Biology at Bielefeld University. His bachelor thesis is about the flavonoid biosynthesis in sugar beet. From 2014 to 2019, Boas participated in the synthetic biology competition iGEM in various roles. While completing the Master of Science program Genome-based Systems Biology, he shifted from molecular biology to bioinformatics and genomics. His doctoral thesis is about comparative analysis of different Arabidopsis thaliana genomes. Boas also investigated non-canonical splice sites in the genome sequences of numerous plant species. Parts of this research were performed during a visit in the Brockington group. In 2019, Boas received his doctoral degree from the Faculty of Biology at Bielefeld University. He was a member of the Computational Methods for the Analysis of the Diversity and Dynamics of Genomes (DiDy) graduate school and completed PhD programs in Biology and Bioinformatics. Boas conducted many ONT long read sequencing and plant genome assembly projects at the Genetics and Genomics of Plants group (Center for Biotechnology, Bielefeld University) and at the Department of Molecular Genetics and Physiology of Plants (Ruhr-University Bochum). Since 2020, he is working as a postdoctoral fellow on the evolution of the betalain biosynthesis supported by a DFG fellowship.
