November 2022 Newsletter
Dear sed-DNA enthusiasts,
Another productive month has passed, and we slowly moving towards the end of the year. Before we prepare for the holiday season, it is good to note that the abstract application deadline for the INQUA2023 conference in Rome has been extended by four weeks. The new deadline is the 28th of November. There are four sessions covering ancient sedimentary DNA; Session 67: Exceptional archives: Leveraging visible and non-visible lagerstätten with cutting-edge methods to broaden our knowledge of Quaternary ecosystems, Session 90: Ancient DNA from Quaternary and Archaeological Sediments, Session 104: Novel molecular tools (biomarkers and DNA) in climatic and environmental archives – challenges, advances, and prospects, and Session 174: Tracing the impact of palaeoenvironmental changes in ancient DNA.
Further, we will continue the society e-coffee meetings with two new dates, Wednesday 9th of November at 09:00 (UTC+2) and Wednesday the 23th of November at 16:00 (UTC+2) to stimulate interaction between members of the society. Everyone is welcome to join in Gathertown for a digital coffee and social chatting. Calendar invites will be sent a few days before via the email list and slack.
October Pacific society seminar
More information on the seminar series will follow.
New papers
Ngoc-Loi Nguyen et al., (2022) published "Metabarcoding reveals high diversity of benthic foraminifera linked to water masses circulation at coastal Svalbard" in geobiology.
Tony Brown et al., (2022) published "Paleoeconomy more than demography determined prehistoric human impact in Arctic Norway " in PNAS Nexus.
Yucheng Wang et al., (2022) published "ngsLCA—A toolkit for fast and flexible lowest common ancestor inference and taxonomic profiling of metagenomic data " in Methods in Ecology and Evolution.
Alexis Marchesini et al., (2022) published "Ancient DNA from speleothems: opportunity or challenge? " in Quaternary Research.
Lieveke van Vugt et al., (2022) published "Pollen, macrofossils and sedaDNA reveal climate and land use impacts on Holocene mountain vegetation of the Lepontine Alps, Italy " in Quaternary Science Reviews.
Sandra Garcés-Pastor et al., (2022) published "High resolution ancient sedimentary DNA shows that alpine plant diversity is associated with human land use and climate change " in Nature Communications.
Preprints
Dawn Lewis (2022) made the preprint "More than dirt: sedimentary ancient DNA and Indigenous Australia " available at Authorea.
New Positions
A invite applications to a PhD project at Newcastle University (UK) that will look at long-term changes in CO2 fixing enzyme (Rubisco) in plant species. Rubisco controls carbon fixation and is strongly temperature-dependent. Little is known about how changes in temperature and CO2 between glacial-interglacial cycles have affected the genetic adaptation of Rubisco. This project aims to use well-preserved plant remains from Late-Pleistocene and Holocene sediments to investigate genetic change in Rubisco, which will be crucial for understanding the speed at which plants can adapt their carbon fixation to future increases in temperature and CO2. Please note that this is a competitive call for funding and that funding success depends mainly on the strength of the shortlisted applicant. For informal enquiries and more information, please contact Dr Maarten van Hardenbroek (maarten.vanhardenbroek@ncl.ac.uk) or Dr Maxim Kapralov (maxim.kapralov@ncl.ac.uk).
A two year Postdoctoral Research Fellow positionis available at the Arctic University Museum of Norway. The applicant will join an international team of researchers on the project “IceAGenT - Ice Age Genomic Tracking of Refugia and Postglacial Dispersal” financed by ERC. The main goal is to forecast the effect of environmental change on future species distribution and genetic diversity. The applicant will be given access to a unique large-scale ancient DNA dataset that can be combined with advances in machine learning technics. Sedimentary ancient DNA provides high-resolution time series from the past. The post doc will use a sedaDNA dataset covering the regions of Iceland, Svalbard, Fennoscandia, Polar Ural and south to the Alps. Both plant and mammals’ data are available from around 50 sediment cores, as well as climate reconstructions. The aplication deadline is the 16th of November 2022 . For more information click here
Contact me at kevin_nota@eva.mpg.de or sedimentarydna@gmail.com if you want to announce something to the society, or if you have a recent paper that you would like to advertise in the newsletter.