On 3-4 June, 2013, a symposium was held in London on the following theme: ‘Tropical biodiversity in the 21st century’. This event was organized by UK’s Natural History Museum.
This conference was focused on ‘Linking taxonomy, genomics and ecological theory‘ and asked how we can develop inter-disciplinary, genomic approaches to accelerate the study of biodiversity and function of tropical ecosystems.
The EDB (Evolution and biological diversity) team, which is member of the CEBA, has taken part through Jérôme Murienne who presented with a poster a research project on arthropod genomics conducted with other people, among whom Amaia Iribar and Jérôme Chave (EDB), also members of the CEBA.
Please find below the abstract of the project:
Lying in the heart of the Amazonian rainforest of French Guiana, the Nouragues field station offers fantastic opportunities to conduct scientific research on biodiversity. Our ongoing METABAR project aims at estimating biodiversity of environmental samples through metabarcoding and is currently focusing on several plots of the research station. In order to build genomic reference libraries for the project, we investigated the potential of next generation shotgun sequencing to reconstruct complete mitochondrial genomes of known species. We used a simple PCR-free approach by sequencing 15 millions paired-end reads per specimen on a Hiseq 2000, performing genome assembly using the OBITOOLS suite.
The approach proved to be not only sufficient to reconstruct complete mitochondrial genomes with adequate coverage, but also nuclear ribosomal genes. Our method has been successfully tested on velvet worms, harvestmen, spiders and butterflies and offers opportunities for building a new generation of genomic reference library, metagenomics as well as phylogenomics.
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For more information:
Presentation poster
Tropical biodiversity symposium programme_June 2013
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