Frank Johannes

Short CV

Prof. Frank Johannes (b. 1976) obtained his PhD in the interdisciplinary program BioBehavioral Health at the Pennsylvania State University (USA), studying statistical genetics at the, then, Centre for Developmental and Health Genetics. He spent the last year of his PhD as a Marie Curie Fellow at the French Institute for Agricultural Research (INRA) in Versailles where he was involved in one of the first population epigenetic studies in plants.
He continued this work first as a post-doc at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) in Paris and later as a post-doc in the bioinformatics unit of the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. He stayed in Groningen as an Assistant Professor before moving to the TUM-IAS as a Rudolf Mößbauer Tenure Track Assistant Professor.

Selected Awards

2015, Wallenberg Academy Fellowship

Research Interests

Prof. Johannes conducts research in the area of population epigenetics and epigenomics. His group combines bioinformatic and statistical genetic approaches with high-throughput molecular data to characterize patterns of epigenetic variation in populations of plants.
The goal is to understand how this variation arises, how stable it is across generations and to which extent it determines agriculturally and evolutionarily relevant plant traits.
The ultimate applied goal is to be able to exploit engineered or naturally occurring epimutations for the improvement of commercial crops.

Selected Publications

• Cortijo, S.; Wardenaar, R.; Colome-Tatche, M.; Gilly, A.; Etcheverry, M.; Labadie, K.; Caillieux, E.; Hospital, F.; Aury, J.-M.; Wincker, P.; Roudier, F.; Jansen, R. C.; Colot, V.; Johannes, F.: Mapping the Epigenetic Basis of Complex Traits. Science 343 (6175), 2014, 1145-1148 

• Cortijo, S.; Wardenaar, R.; Colome-Tatche, M.; Gilly, A.; Etcheverry, M.; Labadie, K.; Caillieux, E.; Hospital, F.; Aury, J.-M.; Wincker, P.; Roudier, F.; Jansen, R. C.; Colot, V.; Johannes, F.: Mapping the Epigenetic Basis of Complex Traits. Science 343 (6175), 2014, 1145-1148

• Johannes, F.; Colome-Tatche, M.: Quantitative Epigenetics Through Epigenomic Perturbation of Isogenic Lines. Genetics 188 (1), 2011, 215-227 

• Johannes, Frank; Porcher, Emmanuelle; Teixeira, Felipe K.; Saliba-Colombani, Vera; Simon, Matthieu; Agier, Nicolas; Bulski, Agnès; Albuisson, Juliette; Heredia, Fabiana; Audigier, Pascal; Bouchez, David; Dillmann, Christine; Guerche, Philippe; Hospital, Frédéric; Colot, Vincent: Assessing the Impact of Transgenerational Epigenetic Variation on Complex Traits. PLoS Genetics 5 (6), 2009, e1000530