Door 21: The evolution of stress related genes in parasitic flatworms

It is always a pleasure if international scientific cooperations deliver exciting results. This was the case with my cooperation with colleagues at the University Hasselt, Belgium. The study was a key component of the PhD thesis of Armando J. Cruz‑Laufer who also coordinated the drafting of the scientific […]

Door 19: The genome of the flatworm model species Schmidtea mediterranea

Earlier this year in September Ivanković and colleagues published the results of a study coordinated by the research group of Jochen Rink at the Max Planck Institute for Multidisciplinary Sciences, Göttingen, Germany and presented highly improved genomes of the four planarian flatworm species from the genus Schmidtea. These […]

Door 16: Small creatures and studying them matters

For today’s advent calendar, I want to talk about my favourite organisms, the protists. In one of my last years advent calendar posts, I talked about their diversity and importance for ecosystem functioning and, therefore, felt like introducing this recent paper by Perrin & Dorrel (2024) fits the […]

Door 15: CEG involvement in the European BGE genome sequencing project

CEG research group members Torsten Struck and myself are coordinating the task of Community Sampling, within WP5 of the the EU-funded BioGenomics Europe project. We have now completed our task, well before the deadline of February 2025 set by BGE. Our task began with annoucing two public calls, […]

Door 5: To sample or not to sample? – winter sampling for benthic marine invertebrates

In CEG group, we collect samples from the nature for various projects such as MeioSkag and PolyPro3 (marine invertebrates) and ANTENNA (insects). Here in the Northern Europe the best season for sampling usually is in the summer, or one might travel to an exotic location to find specific […]

Door 2: Artificial intelligence and taxonomy

The recnt years have seen a hand over fist development of artificial intelligence (AI) applications, and such applications affect the daily life of scientists at an increasing pace, and the ongoing development may in the near future also modify our understanding of science in general. For biologist an […]

The 2024 Master, PhD and PostDoc Days at the Natural History Museum Oslo

In their daily work early career students and scientists are usually very busy with generating and interpreting data for their scientific projects. But it is equally important to discuss results and methods. While scientific conferences offer such opportunities in official settings, the annual Master, PhD and PostDoc Days […]