In pre-Covid times, Samaneh Pazoki has visited our lab for 6 months from Iran as part of her PhD. In the meantime, she has successfully defended her PhD and we could already publish a second paper as part of her stay her. She is interested in Serpulidae from […]

Written by Jose Cerca (former member of our group and now as a guest author on this blog) Spiders are some of the most charismatic animal lineages. Despite this, there are only a handful spider genomes available. This is likely due to their highly repeated and heterozygous genomes. […]

Last week marked the release of a new paper by one member of the Invertomics group, James Fleming, in a field that seems quite far apart from the mission of the lab! "Eye-transcriptome and genome-wide sequencing for Scolecophidia: implications for inferring the visual system of the ancestral snake" was part of a long term collaboration...

A positive work environment and a positive work culture are essential for a strong commitment and engagement. Corona restrictions such as home-office and lockdowns posed a challenge for further development of the FEZ research group. It was a particularly challenging period for the new group members that recently […]

Climate change affects essentially all ecosystems, and there is an intense discussion about the consequences of increasing temperatures. Loss of Arctic sea-ice is certainly among the most obvious consequences, and significant effects on ice-dependent species can be safely assumed. This includes most likely negative effects on polar bears […]

Joining the FEZ group as part of the University of Oslo’s (UiO) Summer Research Program, Pia M. Eriksen is a Bachelor of Biosciences student taking part in an on-going museomics (museum collection genetic studies) project. Working alongside project leader, Rita M. Austin, Pia will contribute to the exploration […]

Living in and on our bodies are trillions of microbial cells belonging to thousands of bacterial species – our microbiome. These microbes play key roles in human health, but little is known about their evolution. Here we investigated the evolutionary history of the hominid oral microbiome by analyzing […]

Cryptic species have for long time been considered as purely a taxonomical challenge. However, in the last decade it has been shown that their recognition has also consequences for several other biological disciplines. Recently, their importance for understanding certain evolutionary processes has been highlighted. Most prominent among these […]

New research highlights and tests the limitations of dental calculus (i.e., calcified dental plaque), a microbiome substrate regularly used to reconstruct ancient foodways. Under the direction of Allison E. Mann from Clemson University, a collaborative team analyzed both synthetic and ancient dental calculus datasets to demonstrate the intrinsic […]

            Systematics can be a tricky business, and the tardigrades are no stranger to this! The study of the diversification of life often requires sorting organisms into groups of more or less closely related ones. These groups are called species, genera, families, orders, classes, phylums and kingdoms. Whilst a […]