Gnathostomuida, also known as “lesser jaw worms”, is a phylum of about 100 described species of minute marine worms. The first gnathostomulid was discovered in 1928, in the fine sand of Kiel (Germany), by Adolf Remane. Later, Riedl (1969) elevated the animal group to the rank of phylum. […]

A 130,000 to 115,000 years old polar bear jawbone fossil from Svalbard. Photo: Karsten Sund, Natural History Museum Oslo.

The bowhead whales (Balaena mysticetus) in the East Greenland Sea, the Svalbard region and the Barents Sea (referred to as the East Greenland-Svalbard-Barents Sea (EGSB) stock) has been intensively studied for many years by members of the FEZ group. The stock is classified as Endangered in the International Union of […]

Usually I work with marine invertebrates from a group called Lophotrochozoa, which comprises among others mollusks, segmented worms and flatworms. However, the paper featured in this blog is the first of several papers to come on insects. While the others will come from Marianne’s PhD project on Aegialites […]

Written by Jose Cerca (former member of our group and now as a guest author on this blog) Spiders are some of the most charismatic animal lineages. Despite this, there are only a handful spider genomes available. This is likely due to their highly repeated and heterozygous genomes. […]

Sequencing technology has changed in research in biology tremendously and probably much more than any other technology before. The development from radioactivity-based to nowadays single-molecule real-time sequencing of tens of thousands of base pairs in a single go in the last three decades is on par with the […]

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 […]

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 […]

This year in September Alberto Valero-Gracia started has a new PhD student in our group. After completing a Bachelor + MSc degree at University Autónoma de Madrid (Spain) he worked as a Marie Curie researcher at the Stazione Zoologica Anton Dohrn (Italy). Throughout his time in Spain and […]