February 2023 Newsletter
Dear sed-DNA enthusiasts,
This is the first newsletter of 2023, and we hope that everyone had a good start to the new year! The society is celebrating its second year of existence in February. In the last two years, the society has grown to 385 members with 504 subscribers to this newsletter, and we are still growing. We are feeling inspired and looking forward to many great events, collaborations, and breakthroughs in the field in the coming years. Starting with the First Circular SedaDNA Meeting in Potsdam from the 6th to the 9th of June 2023, organised by Kathleen Stoof-Leichsenring, Ulrike Herzschuh, and Liv Heinecke from AWI in Potsdam. More information can be found here, including a preliminary programme.
For the students and early career scientists of the society, this is a reminder that we are still organising monthly seminars. It is a great opportunity to network with peers, present your work, ask questions, and get feedback in a friendly low-key environment. For more information see the Monthly Recurring Events section of the events page
Finally, we will continue with more society e-coffee's this month, starting Wednesday the 8th of February at 09:00 (UTC+2) and on Wednesday the 22nd of February at 16:00 (UTX+2). Everyone is welcome to join Gathertown for a digital coffee and social chatting. Calendar invites will be sent a few days before via the email list and the society slack channel.
February Pacific society seminar
More information on the seminar series will follow. Recordings of the previous editions of the seminars can be found here.
New papers
Bradley Paine et al., (2023) published "Coccolithophore assemblage changes over the past 9 kyrs BP from a climate hotspot in Tasmania, southeast Australia" in Marine Micropaleontology.
Lucas D. Elliott et al., (2023) published "Sedimentary Ancient DNA Reveals Local Vegetation Changes Driven by Glacial Activity and Climate" in Quaternary.
Ines Barrenechea Angeles et al., (2023) published "Encapsulated in sediments: eDNA deciphers the ecosystem history of one of the most polluted European marine sites" in Environment International.
Ebuka Canisius Nwosu et al., (2023) published "Early human impact on lake cyanobacteria revealed by a Holocene record of sedimentary ancient DNA" in communications biology.
Haoyu Li et al., (2023) published "Sedimentary DNA for tracking the long-term changes in biodiversity" in Environmental Science and Pollution Research.
Rosie Everett and Becky Cribdon (2023) published "MetaDamage tool: Examining post-mortem damage in sedaDNA on a metagenomic scale. in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution
Pradeep Srivastava et al., (2023) published "A need to integrate metagenomics and metabolomics in geosciences and develop the deep-time digital earth-biome database of India" in Current Science.
Samuel M Hudson et al., (2022) published "Lateglacial and Early Holocene palaeoenvironmental change and human activity at Killerby Quarry, North Yorkshire, UK" in the Journal of Quaternary Science.
Roderick B. Salisbury et al., (2022) published "Making the Most of Soils in Archaeology. A Review" in Archaeologia Austriaca.
Kurt H Kjaer et al., (2022) published "A 2-million-year-old ecosystem in Greenland uncovered by environmental DNA" in Nature.
Saul Rodriguez-Martinez et al., (2022) published "The topological nature of tag jumping in environmental DNA metabarcoding studies" in Molecular Ecology Resources.
Cécilia Barouillet et al., (2022) published "Investigating the effects of anthropogenic stressors on lake biota using sedimentary DNA" in Freshwater Biology.
Preprints
Karina Krarup Sand (2023) made the preprint "Importance of eDNA taphonomy and provenance for robust ecological inference: insights from interfacial geochemistry" available at bioRxiv.
Taru Verma (2023) made the preprint "Sedimentary DNA can influence evolution: Establishing mineral facilitated horizontal gene transfer as a route to bacterial fitness" available at bioRxiv.
New Positions
2-year Postdoctoral Research Position in Bioinformatics and Molecular Ecology at NORCE in Bergen, Norway . The job offer is for a 2-year post-doc (extendable) to work within two EU-funded projects (BIOcean5D and ANERIS). The tasks include : - further developing the SLIM pipeline to integrate long-reads, metaG and metaT processing modules (ANERIS) and - identifying new DNA-based indicators of marine ecosystems health by mining existing 18S metabarcoding data with machine learning / network inference tools (BIOcean5D). There is room for the candidate to develop own ideas on sedaDNA.
Application deadline: February 15th, 2023.
Postdoctoral researcher: environmental genomics at the Institute of Oceanology Polish Academy of Sciences Sopot, Poland . The position is available for 1 year, with a possible extension of up to 2 years, within two projects: the Polish-Norwegian research project NEEDED and EU-funded BIOcean 5D. After the end of the project, we will be able to offer you a permanent position.
Application deadline: February 28th; starting date: as soon as possible.
Contact me at kevin_nota@eva.mpg.de 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.