In June 2021 Vladimir Gusarov made a field trip to Cameroon. The purpose of the trip was to survey the staphylinid beetle fauna of the Ebu forest, collect samples for student projects and train a student from the University of Buea, Ms Grace M’ayuk Ojong-Nkongho. Ebu forest covers […]

Sequencing technology has changed in research in biology tremendously and probably much more than any other technology before. The development from radioactivity-based to nowadays single-molecule real-time sequencing of tens of thousands of base pairs in a single go in the last three decades is on par with the […]

The iconic polar bear (scientific name: Ursus maritimus) has become a symbol of the threats to the ecology and life history of plants and animals from climate change. Shifts in their distributions in recent years are likely caused by the altered Arctic environment. It has, for example, been […]

We hope you enjoyed the wrap up of the year 2020 for the FEZ group as a traditional advent calendar. While setting up the various doors we noticed that we easily could have filled many more, indicating that it was a quite successful year despite all challenges. We are […]

Our calendar is coming to its close and at the second-to-last day it features two Master projects, which started this year working with annelids, which are both completely computer-based making use of the SAGA supercomputer infrastructure through the command line, and all analytical programs used are monitored through […]

In June, Astrid Eggemoen Bang delivered her Masters thesis entitled ‘ The biodiversity of mud dragons (Kinorhyncha) in the fjords of Møre og Romsdal, Norway’ supervised by Lutz and Torsten and Jose. She assessed the biodiversity of Kinorhyncha in five selected fjords on the Norwegian Northwest coast in […]

Between different lockdowns and corona restrictions, we were lucky enough to go to the Faroe Islands. The field work at the Faroe Islands was an important link for describing the Staphylinidae arrival to Iceland, given the Faroes Islands are being placed roughly midway between mainland Europe and Iceland. […]

Øystein and Lutz have worked for many years together with international partners on the genetic differentiation of bowhead whale stocks with particular emphasis on the Spitsbergen stock. The Svalbard bowhead whale population is currently classified as ‘Endangered’ by The International Union of Conservation of Nature (IUCN). Extensive hunting, […]

The aim of our InvertOmics project is to obtain high-quality genomes for different spiralian/lophotrochozoan phyla at the level required by the Earth BioGenome Project. Therefore, we will use the new PacBio HiFi technology. However, this required high-molecular-weight DNA at really high quality and in high amount. This is […]

A new Postdoctoral Research Fellow has arrived in our lab this month. Over the next three years, James will be hard at work understanding the relationships between various different groups of flatworms, roundworms and molluscs. However, for the last two years, James has been up to something completely […]