Bioinformatics meets biodiversity: The animal kingdom as a patchwork family

Professor Michael Matschiner is fascinated by the spectacular diversity of the animal kingdom. Vertebrates in particular are his specialty: Which species exist? How are they related to each other? When did they evolve, and how did species multiply in the past? To tackle questions such as these, the professor draws primarily on genetic and bioinformatic analytics.

Matschiner has held the Chair of Systematic Zoology at LMU since December 2024, and he is also the new Research Director of the Bavarian State Collection of Zoology (ZSM). He is interested in the animal kingdom for its own sake, but he also understands its importance to humanity: “We could not survive on this planet without biodiversity. So, it is critical to know which species exist and how they relate to each other.”

Antarctic fish: Icy diversity beneath the waves

Right now, he is especially fond of a very specific group of fish: Antarctic fish. Almost all fish species that populate the shelf areas around the Antarctic continent belong to this group, whose scientific designation – Notothenioidei – is quite hard to pronounce unpronounceable. Special antifreeze proteins in their blood help these creatures defy the icy cold of the Antarctic – an example of evolutionary convergence, given that similar proteins have developed completely independently among other groups of fish in the Arctic Ocean at the other end of the world.

The Antarctic fish originated from a single parental species only ten million years ago. Their explosive radiation shaped the entire ecosystem – which is what makes these fish so interesting for Matschiner’s research: “Like the Darwin finches on the Galápagos Islands, the Antarctic fish have come to dominate a variety of ecological niches: from tiny plankton feeders to two-meter-long predators.” Together with colleagues from Italy, Chile and the USA, Matschiner has so far collected some 10,000 specimens, 800 of which have already been sequenced. The aim is to include all 110 known species of Antarctic fishes in the data record in order to fully decode the genesis of – and the relationships that exist between – this unique group.

Reconstructing family trees with DNA testing and bioinformatics

During his undergraduate studies and for his doctoral thesis, Matschiner focused primarily on evolutionary biology. Systematic aspects were added increasingly as time went on. Before taking up his present position at LMU, he conducted postdoctoral research in New Zealand and, subsequently, in Oslo from 2013 through 2017. This period was followed by further postdoctoral activities at the Universities of Basel and Zurich, before he returned to Norway as Associate Professor for Vertebrate Zoology at the Natural History Museum in Oslo. He has been a professor at LMU since December 2024. “I already knew people at the Faculty of Biology, and I knew they do excellent research here,” he says. Ultimately, it was the combination of such a renowned location, the research environment and the possibilities afforded by the State Collection of Zoology that convinced him to come to Munich.

In Norway, Matschiner had already worked hard on DNA-based methods to reconstruct phylogenetic (or family) trees. “The methods have advanced considerably in recent years, and I was part of this development to some extent,” the biologist explains. The methods need a lot of computing power, particularly because ever larger data sets have to be analyzed over time. “In the past, you might perhaps sequence a single mitochondrial gene. Today we compare entire genomes – and not just from one individual per species, but from several of them.” This approach supplies vast quantities of information, but it also places heavy demands on bioinformatic systems and computational capacity.

Hybridization: When the lines between species become blurred

The new methods in place today can give researchers a completely new insight into systems within the animal kingdom. To take an example: Hybridization appears to play a far greater role in speciation than was hitherto believed. Horses and donkeys were long seen as a typical example: Their offspring – mules – are sterile. They cannot reproduce. “But genomic data now shows that many hybrid creatures in the wild are indeed fertile, and that genetic information can be exchanged between species,” Matschiner notes. This exchange can also help species adapt better to changing environmental conditions, which in turn could theoretically lead to the emergence of new species.
Hybridization is evidently widespread in the animal kingdom. And this raises questions about how clear the lines are between different species in reality: “What exactly a species is remains the subject of heated debate.” If we were to apply the strict concept of species used in the 1980s, Matschiner argues that, to put it bluntly, there would suddenly only be a handful of species. Many ducks, for instance, would have to be combined under a single species heading, because so much hybridization takes place in this group and the lines become blurred. The situation is similar among seagulls and many other animals. If the concept of species is to have any practical value, he contends, it must be more flexible: Species can be stable units even if genetic interchange in the form of hybridization takes place at the edges. This does not mean that the species merge with each other; they can still continue to exist as separate species.

 22 million zoological objects

During his time at the Natural History Museum in Oslo, Michael Matschiner was responsible for the fish collection, which had around 10,000 specimens. In Munich, he now also works at the Bavarian State Collection of Zoology, which covers the whole of the animal kingdom: Close to 22 million objects make it one of the largest natural history research collections in the world.
At LMU, Matschiner has set up a special laboratory in which to analyze museum specimens. Here, DNA can be extracted from historical specimens and grafted into analyses of phylogenetic trees. This in turn opens up new possibilities: “We can now study how biodiversity has changed over time.” And it is precisely here that we see the tremendous value of the Bavarian State Collection of Zoology, whose numerous objects provide a unique insight into the history of biodiversity: “We can now reconstruct past changes and make forecasts about the future.”