Blogs of the CEG research group

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 […]

To celebrate the wave of sunny weather here in Oslo, members of the FEZ group decided to go on a sunny spring hike up Grefsenkollen together. At the top we were greeted by a fantastic view of Oslo and the fjord, great food from the Grefsenkollen restaurant, and […]

Monogeneans are a group of parasitic flatworms (Platyheminthes). The group is species-rich and systematists assign them to a class within the flatworms. Together with flukes (class Trematoda) and tapeworms (class Cestoda) they form the superclass Neodermata. The name-giving feature Neodermata is that the original epidermis is replaced by a […]

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 […]

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 […]

This month it is time for another group of polychaetes, the family Sabellidae. Sabellids are present from intertidal to abyssal marine waters all around the world (Rouse et al. 2022). They inhabit both soft substrates such as sand or mud and hard substrates such as rocks or coral […]

Yesterday, Jørgen Hansen Starholm defended his Master thesis “Solving phylogenetic relationships within the Rove beetle genus Aleochara (Coleoptera: Staphylinidae) by utilizing a novel approach based on High Throughput Sequencing” successfully. The purpose of the thesis was to infer a phylogeny of Aleochara based on more nuclear markers and […]

In the summer of last year, Zoologica Scripta organized an international symposium around the topic of ‘The role of systematics for understanding ecosystem functions’ in the premises of Norwegian Academy of Sciences and Letters in Oslo. The symposium aimed at offering a forum for exploring and discussing trends […]

Last week, as part of a special issue of Zoologica Scripta, I started the year with my first paper – and my first solo effort! “The Wealth of Shared Resources: Improving molecular taxonomy using eDNA and public databases” is a rather portentous title for a pretty simple experiment. […]

This month’s group of animals on the spotlight are nemerteans, also known as ribbon worms, vermiform creatures belonging to the phylum Nemertea. They include more than 1300 species, typically long and slender with soft contractile bodies. Most nemerteans are marine, predominantly benthic or bottom dwellers, but some species […]