Felix M. Key finished 2010 his undergrad in human biology at the University of Greifswald (Germany), with a major in immunology and microbiology. Felix earned a PhD (summa cum laude) in Population Genetics from the Max-Planck-Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig (Germany) in 2016, where he worked on human local adaptation using modern and ancient genomes. Funding was awarded by Max Planck Research School of Human Origins.
Following, Felix performed a two-year PostDoc at the Max-Planck-Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena (Germany) with Johannes Krause, where he developed bioinformatic tools to study ancient microbes and reconstructed the genomes of major human pathogens from the Neolithic in order to understand their phylogenetic and adaptive history.
Felix joined the Lieberman lab at MIT in 2018, working on intrahost evolution of different pathogens part of the human microbiome during health and disease. Felix was awarded a two-year fellowship by the German Research Foundation.
Starting in September 2020 Felix will join the Max-Planck-Institute for Infection Biology in Berlin as a group leader. The Key lab will dissect bacterial evolution using medical and archaeological samples.
Full list of publications on Google Scholar.
Link to CV (last update 05/2019).
Contact: fkey [at] mit.edu
Selected Publications
- Emergence of human-adapted Salmonella enterica is linked to the Neolithization process
Felix M. Key, Cosimo Posth, Luis R. Esquivel-Gomez, Ron Hübler, Maria A. Spyrou, Gunnar U. Neumann, Anja Furtwängler, Susanna Sabin, Marta Burri, Antje Wissgott, Aditya Kumar Lankapalli, Åshild J. Vågene, Matthias Meyer, Sarah Nagel, Rezeda Tukhbatova, Aleksandr Khokhlov, Andrey Chizhevsky, Svend Hansen, Andrey B. Belinsky, Alexey Kalmykov, Anatoly R. Kantorovich, Vladimir E. Maslov, Philipp W. Stockhammer, Stefania Vai, Monica Zavattaro, Alessandro Riga, David Caramelli, Robin Skeates, Jessica Beckett, Maria Giuseppina Gradoli, Noah Steuri, Albert Hafner, Marianne Ramstein, Inga Siebke, Sandra Lösch, Yilmaz Selim Erdal, Nabil-Fareed Alikhan, Zhemin Zhou, Mark Achtman, Kirsten Bos, Sabine Reinhold, Wolfgang Haak, Denise Kühnert, Alexander Herbig, Johannes Krause
Nature Ecology & Evolution (2020) free-to-read-link
News and Views in Science and Nature Ecol & Evol - HOPS: Automated detection and authentication of pathogen DNA in archaeological remains
Ron Huebler*, Felix M. Key*, Christina Warinner, Kirsten I Bos, Johannes Krause, Alexander Herbig
Genome Biology (2019) - Human local adaptation of the TRPM8 cold receptor along a latitudinal cline
Felix M Key, Muslihudeen Abdul-Aziz, Roger Mundry, Benjamin M Peter, Mauro Sekar, Aarthi, D’Amato, Megan Y Dennis, Joshua M Schmidt, Aida M AndrésPLoS Genetics (2018)
- Mining metagenomic data sets for ancient DNA: recommended protocols for authentication
FM Key, C Posth, J Krause, A Herbig, KI BosTrends in Genetics (2017)
- Human adaptation and population differentiation in the light of ancient genomes
FM Key, Q Fu, F Romagné, M Lachmann, AM AndrésNature Communications (2016)
- Selection on a variant associated with improved viral clearance drives local, adaptive pseudogenization of interferon lambda 4 (IFNL4)
Felix M Key, Benjamin Peter, Megan Y Dennis, Emilia Huerta-Sánchez, Wei Tang, Ludmila Prokunina-Olsson, Rasmus Nielsen, Aida M AndrésPLoS Genetics (2014)
- Advantageous diversity maintained by balancing selection in humans
FM Key, JC Teixeira, C de Filippo, AM AndrésCurrent Opinion in Genetics & Development (2014)