March 2024 Newsletter
Dear sed-DNA enthusiasts,
Spring is in the air in the northern hemisphere while the summer is ending in the southern. Not much has happened in the short month of February - but many papers were published. The Google Groups email chain is also being used quite a bit this month. We would like to remind you, that everyone can send a mail to sedadna-society@googlegroups.com, and it will be automatically sent to the 450 emails registered in the list. You can use this to announce job positions, and conference sessions, but also to establish collaborations by sending project proposals.
As usual, papers published and pre-prints in the previous month are listed below.
New papers
Jan Laine et al., (2024) published "Late Pleistocene stickleback environmental genomes reveal the chronology of freshwater adaptation " in Current Biology.
Claudia Piccini et al., (2024) published "Prokaryotic richness and diversity increased during Holocene glacier retreat and onset of an Antarctic Lake " in communications earth & environment.
Nicole R. Foster et al., (2024) published "Environmental DNA identifies coastalplant community shift 1,000 years agoin Torrens Island, South Australia " in communications earth & environment.
Dongna Yan et al., (2024) published "Organic matter content and source is associated with the depth-dependent distribution of prokaryotes in lake sediments" in Freshwater Biology.
Dongna Yan et al., (2024) published "Anthropogenic drivers accelerate the changes of lake microbial eukaryotic communities over the past 160 years" in Quaternary Science Reviews.
Prashasti Singh et al., (2024) published "Marine sedimentary ancient DNA from Antarctic diatoms " in Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology.
Georgia Thomson-Laing et al., (2024) published "Sedimentary ancient DNA reveals the impact of anthropogenic land use disturbance and ecological shifts on fish community structure in small lowland lake " in Science of The Total Environment.
Armando Espinosa Prieto et al., (2024) published "Finding the perfect pairs: A matchmaking of plant markers and primers for multi-marker eDNA metabarcoding " in Molecular Ecology Resources.
Leighton King et al., (2024) published "Anthropogenic forcing leads to an abrupt shift to phytoplankton dominance in a shallow eutrophic lake " in Freshwater Biology.
Preprints
Alexandra Schmidt(2023) made the preprint "Decoding the Baltic Sea's Past and Present: A simple Molecular Index for Ecosystem Assessment" available at bioRxiv
Aleksandra Laura Pach(2023) made the preprint "Digesting the data: Proper validation in ancient metagenomic studies is essential" available at bioRxiv
New positions
A 4 year position is availbile at the Arctic University of Norway. The PhD will be part of the Norwegian Centre for Arctic Ecosystem Genomics (ArcEcoGen) at the Arctic University Museum, UiT, Tromsø. ArcEcoGen centre focuses on the combined effect of humans, climate, and biota on northern ecosystem dynamics in the past, present, and future using environmental DNA (eDNA) techniques.
The largest impact of climate change currently seen on arctic vegetation is the northwards expansion of shrub tundra. However, shrubs may be impacted by a range of factors such as herbivory, snow cover, moisture, and temperatures, and the long-term impact are not well known. Ancient DNA has recently revolutionised our understanding of effect of past climate changes as it provides a local vegetation signal of high taxonomic resolution. Unfortunately, the dominant shrub genera, birch (Betula) and willow (Salix), are rarely distinguished to species level in ancient DNA studies. This PhD will focus on 1) develop methods for species level identification of shrubs from lake sediments, and 2) use latitudinal gradients of sedimentary ancient DNA to study past effects of environmental changes on arctic greening. See here for more information
Applications deadline: 1st April 2024
A 30-month post-doc researcher (can be extended) is available in Bergen on the project BIOcean5D, a pan-European EU-funded consortia: "BIOcean5D unites major European centres in molecular and cell biology; marine biology; and sequencing, together with 31 partners from 11 countries, to build a unique suite of technologies, protocols, and models allowing holistic re-exploration of marine biodiversity, from viruses to mammals, from genomes to holobionts, across multiple spatial and temporal scales, stretching from pre-industrial history to today. "</p>
The post-doc project aims at mining global-scale metagenomics datasets of plankton and sediment biodiversity, to analyse the patterns of marine biodiversity from the sunlit surface to the deep-ocean floor. The main objective is to get a better understanding of the plankton communities that contribute most to carbon sequestration in the deep ocean. Another objective is to develop a better understanding of diverse and inconspicuous deep-sea benthic biodiversity using omics methods.
Further development towards sedimentary ancient DNA in marine settings are expected.
More details on the profile here
Starting date: June / July 2024.
Application deadline: The review process will start immediately and the position will remain open until filled.
A full-time PhD position is available in the fields of marine microbial ecology, paleogenomics and bioinformatics at NORCE Climate and Environment in Bergen, Norway.
The research will focus on the impact of past environmental change on marine microbial diversity in Norwegian and Arctic fjords using sedimentary ancient DNA. The position is available from 01.09.2024 and for a fixed-term period of 3 years. The position will be located at NORCE, and you will be enrolled as a PhD student at the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Bergen. See here for more information
Applications deadline: March 24th, 2024.
Contact me at kevin_nota@eva.mpg.de or you want to announce something to the society, or if you have a recent paper that you would like to advertise in the newsletter.