Blogs of the CEG research group

The year 2021 was full of unexpected happenings and opportunities for both students, as in me Marianna Khodabandehlou and my fellow student, Sine Hagestad. We both were doing our last semester in our Biosciences degree and wanted to gain some hands-on experience before we began our Masters. We […]

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 […]

In the last two weeks of August, the ArtsDatabanken team has came together for the first big field trip. While sadly not everyone could join, seven researchers from Oslo, Berlin and Gothenburg comprised the diverse and highly motivated group. The destination was Sletvik, a biological station in the […]

The Covid-19 shutdown and restrictions halted any opportunities to learn about and contribute to on-going research at the University of Oslo (UiO). Because I’m (Pia M. Eriksen; Figure 1) considering a master’s degree in biological sciences, I have been planning and looking for ways to engage in biological […]

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 […]

While museum collections contain historic materials that provide insight into various evolutionary and social aspects of the past, museums are dynamic, not only for the types of collections they contain, but also for their diverse research foci. For the Natural History Museum of Oslo and the Frontiers in […]

Until relatively recently, museum collections have been amassed and utilized to investigate the morphological variation seen within and across species to understand evolutionary change. With the advent of next generation sequencing (NGS) and improved molecular methodologies, natural history collections have become ideal sources of curated (documented) materials to […]

During his PhD Jose was interested in the evolution of the cryptic species complexes in the annelid genus Stygocapitella, which occurs at sandy beaches around the world. Part of his thesis also comprised population-genomic studies to understand the underlying genomic background of morphological stasis. During the phylogenomic studies […]

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 […]

Author: Rita Austin (former group member) 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 […]

            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 […]

Natural history collections contain a plethora of objects, organisms, and information, representing real-world diversity, variation, and relationships. Collections allow scientists to understand and classify the natural world. Within biology, scientists classify and categorize animal species using taxonomy, a classification system based on the identification, description, and naming of […]

This week a member of our group, Torsten Struck, published a review paper on the two annelid families Parergodrilidae and Orbiniidae together with Miguel Meca from the University Museum of Bergen as the first author and Anna Zhadan from the Lomonosov Moscow State University in the journal Diversity. […]

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 […]

FEZ members are also involved in academic teaching. This year, as for many others in the world it was special experience due to Covid. We will provide her an example of two Master level courses. This spring many members of the group as well as others from the […]

Last year, Marianne started her PhD-project in the FEZ-group. Marianne kick-started her project with a fieldtrip to the east-coast of USA to collect beetles. The beetles, which live in the cracks and crevices on rocky shores, proved to be difficult to find. With hammer and chisel, she managed […]

The last UiO:Life Science summer project in our group was conducted by Mari Dønnum Klausen. She investigated the distribution of meiofauna organisms along public swimming beaches on Nesodden. She herself wrote about her project on her final poster: “To be able to understand human impact on ecological systems, […]