Raising the treasure of the collections for barcoding

The Biodiversity Genomic Europe (BGE) project has three streams dealing with the biodiversity crisis. In the blog so far, we have mostly presented about one stream, the European Reference Genome Atlas (ERGA) one concentrating on the genomic side of the project. However, another stream is concentrating on the […]

Group of the Month: Diphyllobothrium

Known as broad or fish tapeworms, these spaghetti impersonators are some of the largest parasites that can infect humans. Transmitted to humans via undercooked or raw fish meat, Diphyllobothrium are found in fresh and marine waterways around the world. Characterized as flatworms, they are also considered pseudophyllidean cestodes, […]

Door 13: Expanding Sources of DNA in Museums

Diverse museum holdings offer unique and exciting potential sources of ancient DNA and other biomolecules (e.g., RNA and proteins). As technology and methods advance, the accessibility and potential for success of ancient DNA has also increased; alongside the attainment of ancient DNA and other biolmolecules from once condemned […]

Bringing museum specimens back into the light: Meet the new postdoctoral researcher molecularly exploring museum collections

Rita M. Austin, a recent addition to the FEZ group, is working as a postdoctoral researcher exploring and optimizing the recovery of museum biomolecules in the Oslo Natural History Museum collections. Rita completed her PhD earlier this year at the University of Oklahoma, where she conducted meta- and […]

Assessing biodiversity in the marine algae belt

The marine algae belt comprising kelp forests, seagrass meadows and rocky reefs with coralline red seaweeds is one of the most active primary producing environments in the sea. It also harbors are great diversity of animals including sea squirts, ribbon worms, nick worms, serpulid worms, spionid worms and […]

Natural history collections in the molecular era

Public outreach is an important task for scientists, not only for those based at natural history museums. FEZ researchers aim at disseminating relevant topics relating to the group’s research interests to the public. In 2020, José, Torsten and Lutz published together with our colleague Arild Johnsen from the […]