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 […]