DOE Joint Genome Institute

Our Science
Home › Our Science › Science Programs & Platforms Leads › Frederik Schulz

Frederik Schulz

Frederik Schulz, research scientist at JGI who leads the New Lineages of Life group.

Frederik Schulz, research scientist at JGI who leads the New Lineages of Life group.

Dr. Frederik Schulz joined the DOE Joint Genome Institute in 2016 and is leading the New Lineages of Life Group. His research is focussed on the discovery of novel bacterial, archaeal and eukaryotic microbes and viruses in environmental sequence data. Dr. Schulz employs multi-omics (metagenomics, metatranscriptomics, single cell genomics and phylogenomics) and machine learning to find novel functions that may impact microbiome structure and biogeochemical cycles. He provides his expertise to the JGI user community and supports various user projects in the Microbial Program. In two LDRD-funded projects Dr. Schulz 1) collaborates with researchers at UC Davis on environmental (wastewater) surveillance of SARS-CoV-2 and 2) establishes a single-cell-based discovery pipeline for terrestrial protists. The aim of the latter project is to shed light on diversity and important ecological roles of microeukaryotes in terrestrial ecosystems.

Awards and Service

  • Senior Editor ISME Journal
  • LBNL LDRD (Viral Variant Surveillance) FY2021
  • LBNL LDRD (Soil Protists) FY2022
  • Austrian Academy of Sciences Fellowship (2011-2015)
  • DAAD (“German Academic Exchange Service”) scholarship (2008-2009)
  • VDI (“Association of German Engineers”) award for exceptional academic achievements (2008)

Education

  • B.Sc. Biochemistry, University of Applied Sciences Mannheim, Germany
  • M.Sc. Molecular Microbiology, University of Vienna, Austria
  • PhD  in Microbiology and Bioinformatics from University of Vienna, Austria

Selected Publications

A complete publications list is available at Google Scholar.

  1. Nayfach et al. (2021) A genomic catalog of Earth’s microbiomes. Nature Biotechnology 39, 499-509.
  2. Schulz et al. (2020) Giant virus diversity and host interactions through global metagenomics. Nature. 578 (7795), 432-436
  3. Schulz et al. (2020) Advantages and limits of metagenomic assembly and binning of a giant virus. mSystems. 5 (3)
  4. Schulz et al. (2018) Hidden diversity of soil giant viruses. Nature Communications. 9 (1), 1-9
  5. Roux et al. (2018) Minimum Information about an Uncultivated Virus Genome (MIUViG). Nature Biotechnology 37, 29–37.
  6. Hesse et al. (2018) Genome‐based evolutionary history of Pseudomonas spp. Environmental microbiology 20 (6), 2142-2159
  7. Schulz et al. (2017) Towards a balanced view of the bacterial tree of life. Microbiome. 5 (1), 1-6
  8. Schulz et al. (2017) Giant viruses with an expanded complement of translation system components. Science, 356 (6333), 82-85