Speaker
Description
Metabarcoding is a versatile, powerful and widely used tool for the identification of taxonomic entities, uncovering hidden diversity, assessing of community composition in space and time, elucidating species interactions and food webs, and monitoring biodiversity changes. Metabarcoding allows the monitoring of biodiversity over the whole taxonomic range - bacteria, protists, fungi, animals, and plants - using short variable gene sequences, and it is applied within the realms of ecology, conservation biology, invasion biology, and biomonitoring. The goal of the Support Unit iBarc is to enable more iDiv researchers to benefit from metabarcoding while making molecular approaches and advanced sequence data analysis an integral part of their biodiversity assessments. iBarc will provide direct access to metabarcoding services, starting from project planning via molecular lab support and services to downstream bioinformatics analysis, and offer expert support and advice for data analysis of a broad range of taxonomic groups commonly targeted in metabarcoding studies. In addition, we aim to use the joint interest in metabarcoding to foster scientific integration and initiate new collaborative projects across diverse taxonomic groups, iDiv research areas, and iDiv locations. To achieve these goals, iBarc comprises a Support & Service Center and a Research Network. The Support & Service Center offers a broad range of services, ranging from molecular lab services, provision of state-of-the art analysis pipelines and reference databases to courses for the iDiv consortium. The Research Network will include a communication platform to ensure regular exchange between working groups using metabarcoding, a think tank for the discussion of theoretical questions and unifying concepts associated with molecular biodiversity assessments, and meetings and workshops to foster new collaborative projects. In this poster presentation, we invite everybody interested in metabarcoding to learn more about our mission and services.
| Status Group | Senior Scientist |
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