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Category Archives: community ecology
Snapshots of Biodiversity: eDNA as a methodology for species detection
Nicole Conner wrote this post as a project for Stacy Krueger-Hadfield’s Conservation Genetics course at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. She is a Master’s student in Dr. Thane Wibbels’ lab where she is developing new protocol to detect diamondback terrapins off … Continue reading
It’s all because of the holobiont
It’s conference season at the Molecular Ecologist. I went for the first time to a Gordon Research Conference (GRC). GRCs @GordonConf are well known for their efforts to foster an informal and inclusive atmosphere where frontier research in the biological, … Continue reading
Posted in Coevolution, community ecology, conferences, conservation, ecology, evolution, Symbiosis, Uncategorized
Tagged conferences, ecology, Evolution, holobiont, nested ecosystems, symbiosis
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Luck be a Korarchaeota tonight
Some tiny microbes are making a pretty big splash, and not just in the hot springs they call home in Yellowstone National Park. Recently, there was an interesting article published in Nature Microbiology about some amazing archaea, which are generally … Continue reading
Posted in community ecology, ecology, evolution, genomics, metagenomics, microbiology, Uncategorized
Tagged archaea, hot springs, korarchaeota, yellowstone national park
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The (silent) thunder down under: mud volcanoes and the microbes that love them
One of the most recognized and distributed photographs ever is of the earth taken by the crew of the Apollo 17 spacecraft 28,000 miles above where you’re reading this, and was named “The Blue Marble“. As the photo implies, our … Continue reading
Posted in community, community ecology, ecology, microbiology
Tagged deep sea, greenhouse gas, methane, mud volcanoes
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Conference catch-up: The many colors of snow
Red snow … watermelon snow … green snow … did you know that snow came in so many different colors? I had never heard of watermelon ice (#🍉❄) until a talk given by Robin Kodner from Western Washington University at … Continue reading
Posted in adaptation, bioinformatics, citizen science, community ecology, evolution, fieldwork, mating system, microbiology, natural history, phylogenetics, phylogeography, population genetics, selection, speciation, transcriptomics
Tagged biogeochemistry, Chlamydomonas nivalis, clonality, conference, ecology, Evolution, genetics, genomics, geoecology, life cycles, Snow algae, species, workshop
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For flexible eDNA analysis, just capture whatever you want
Environmental DNA sampling for multi-taxa species detection (i.e., the inference of species presence from genetic material in the environment) has been a hot topic lately. Some of the most exciting recent work has used high-throughput sequence (HTS) to simultaneously screen … Continue reading
Posted in community ecology, DNA barcoding, metagenomics, methods
Tagged environmental dna, sequence capture
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Metabarcoding for every body, every habitat, every time
The immediate reason why I wanted to write about Boosting DNA metabarcoding for biomonitoring with phylogenetic estimation of operational taxonomic units’ ecological profiles is its usefulness for the scientific community and the effort of the authors to make their study reproducible. … Continue reading
What is DAS? A new tool to recover genomes from metagenomes
There are a lot of data out there, and if you haven’t already noticed the ‘omics train has steadily stayed its path through the fruitful (but challenging) world of metagenomics. Metagenomics offers the chance to unravel complex microbial communities without … Continue reading
Signal Boosting a Comprehensive Review of eDNA and Metabarcoding Studies
Everything is meta these days – metabarcoding, metagenomics, and now meta blog posts that are reviews of reviews. Much like every ecologist at least dabbles in the molecular world, so most of those predisposed to molecular ecology and population genetics … Continue reading
Posted in bioinformatics, community ecology, DNA barcoding, metagenomics, methods, microbiology, next generation sequencing, population genetics
Tagged barcode tags, barcoding, bioinformatics, eukaryotes, Illumina, metagenomics, methods, microbial communities, microbial community analysis, microbiome, NGS
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Major new microbial groups expand diversity and alter our understanding of the tree of life
I still believe in revolutions. And sometimes they just happen, almost unnoticed. One such revolution happened on a boring 11th of April 2016 when Laura Hug et al. published their new tree of life in the journal of Nature Microbiology. … Continue reading