Blogs of the CEG research group

They may look a bit like bacteria, but Placozoans are actually animals! These microscopic blobs might, in fact, be key to understanding our own deep evolutionary history, and how the diversity of other animals came to be. Although they were discovered way back in 1883, there are only […]

            A few weeks ago, the FEZ group produced another new paper, this time in Evolutionary Applications, titled “Identifying and addressing methodology incongruence in phylogenetics: a review”. It’s actually the first review I’ve ever been involved in writing and was a big change from my usual research work. […]

The curriculum of academic studies is usually brimming with lectures, seminars and courses that aim at an efficient transfer of detailed knowledge. This is particularly true at the Bachelor level in Biology, that aims to provide a broad overview of many different disciplines in the field as the […]

This month at the blog, we wish to present Hydroza, which is a class found within phylum Cnidaria. This lesser-known taxa is perhaps more known than thought, as well-known species like Portuguese man-o-wars (Physalia physalis), the freshwater genus Hydra, fire coral (Milleporidae), and by-the-wind sailors (Velella velella). Also, […]

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 […]