Door 1: Sequencing genomes suggested by the community

It is the time of the year again and we are running our advent calendar again. The first door opened and reveals an update on the Biodiversity Genomics Europe (BGE) project. The project started about a year ago and it is time to take a first look at […]

Doing genomic research with a masonry trowel

When you think about genomic research and sequencing genomes like it is the goal of the Earth Biogenome Project (EBP), Biodiversity Genomics Europe (BGE) or InvertOmics you have in mind all these new fancy technologies called Next-Generation, Third-generation or High-through-put sequencing. All these amazing advances in technologies allowing […]

Group of the month: Rotifera

Rotifers, or “wheel animalcules”, are an interesting group of microscopic animals (size between 0.1 and 1mm in length) commonly found both in fresh water and terrestrial habitats; although less number of species have been described, marine rotifer species exist too. In regards with their classification, rotifers belong to […]

ERGA pilot project – what can we learn for future genome projects

As a proof of principle the European Reference Genome Atlas (ERGA) consortium initiated at the beginning a pilot study. Several sequences centers and different research projects contributed to this pilot study allowing the first sequencing of reference genomes across Europe and setting the stage for application of the […]

The story about the Norwegian banker and the Hawaiian spiders ends – it was a great collaboration

Last week a long journey finally came to a result. If you remember, we were lucky to secure a Peder Sather grant to secure a collaboration between Rosemarie Gillespie’s lab and ours. Just a reminder from the last blog; Peder Sather was a banker and founder of the […]

ERGA pilot project – the selected species

As a proof of principle the European Reference Genome Atlas (ERGA) consortium initiated at the beginning a pilot study. Several sequences centers and different research projects contributed to this pilot study allowing the first sequencing of reference genomes across Europe and setting the stage for application of the […]

Writing a Review: Introducing Your Field

            A few weeks ago, the FEZ group produced another new paper, this time in Evolutionary Applications, titled “Identifying and addressing methodology incongruence in phylogenetics: a review”. It’s actually the first review I’ve ever been involved in writing and was a big change from my usual research work. […]

The chosen ones or how to select species to genome sequence

The last years have seen an increasing number of sequencing consortia being established in support of the Earth Biogenome Project’s (EBP) goal of sequencing the genomes of each eukaryotic species. In Europe, these consortia are, for example, Darwin Tree of Life (DToL), EBP-Norway (EBP-Nor), ATLAsea or Biodiversity Genomics […]

The mitochondrial gene order of Annelida – extremely old, but still working

Mitochondria are the energy plant of our cells. Originally, they were bacteria, but then they were captured by the ancestors of eukaryotes (among others all animals, mushrooms and plants) and used to produce energy for the cell. This is also known as the endosymbiotic theory. An inheritance from […]

The measure of our reach: understanding evolution when our models break down.

Last week I was lucky enough to have another paper come out, this time in BMC Bioinformatics: “nRCFV: a new, dataset-size-independent metric to quantify compositional heterogeneity in nucleotide and amino acid datasets” It’s a less elegant title than usual, I’ll admit! In addition, for a biological paper, there […]