HIFMB

"As a child, it was the color that fascinated Iliana Baums about the sea. Today, the molecular ecologist has built up a reputation in the study of coral reefs. The key question of her research: How do reefs manage to adapt to climate change? The situation is critical, says the expert - but she does not want to give up hope." Recommended reading: Insightful portrait about Iliana Baums, HIFMB Co-Director and Head of the Marine Conservation Group. ➡️ https://lnkd.in/eHdxFHRW #marineconservation #marinebiodiversity #hifmbfaces

🔔Open Call for Knowledge & Call for Interest! 🌊 Eklipse invites #scientists, #policymakers, #practitioners, and societal actors to contribute their #knowledge and #expertise on the ecological requirements of #marine #species and #habitats designated under the EU Birds and Habitats Directives (Natura 2000 sites). Your insights will directly support Member States in setting site-specific conservation objectives, strengthening evidence-based marine protection across European sea basins. 🌍 📝 Contribute in two ways: 🧠Share your knowledge – past or ongoing initiatives, reports, scientific work, or experience on ecological needs of marine habitats and species 🤝Join the Expert Working Group – help develop a practical blueprint that guides policy and conservation outcomes 📅 Deadline: 7 May 2025 🔗 Form: https://lnkd.in/dbZTdQZE 🌐 More info: https://eklipse.eu/calls/ #EklipseEurope #CallForKnowledge #MarineConservation #ExpertWorkingGroup #SciencePolicy #Natura2000 #Biodiversity #EUHabitatDirective #OceanScience #EcologicalExpertise

📣 #MTTM Dr. Iva Veseli is a postdoc working with Dr. A. Murat Eren in the Ecosystem Data Science group at HIFMB Oldenburg. Within C-CoMP, Iva writes software to help answer core and fundamental questions about microbial ecology 🦠 using big sequencing datasets from the ocean 🌊 . The software that Iva develops is used to analyze microbial sequencing data and generate hypotheses about microbial metabolic capacities for further exploration. Iva is interested in all things microbial - spanning environments from the human gut to the water column - but is very interested in the coral microbiome; microbes are so important for corals 🪸, yet there is still so much we don't know about the roles they play within corals!

If your research relies upon PacBio assemblies, you must know that those may not be the genomes you are looking for 🪄 The most recent work from our group led by Florian Trigodet in collaboration with Jill Banfield's group explains why that might be the case for applications of long-read sequencing to metagenomics. Long-read assemblers play a significant role in turning individual long reads into long genomic segments, and they have tremendous implications on our downstream work. Last year we applied some of the new assemblers to our PacBio datasets from marine samples. Results were extremely exciting at first -- many circular elements, near-complete genomes, etc. But a closer inspection made us realize that the results didn't make much sense in some cases. Some 'circular' contigs were just fragments of larger genomes, and there were way too many circular contigs that were short yet didn't resemble plasmids or viruses. Instead, most of these short circular sequences looked like fragments of larger genomes. As is often the case when faced with surprising results, we thought that we probably were wrong in raising red flags, and those weird contigs were not weird at all. Perhaps this was a new perspective that comes to light thanks to the availability of long reads. But then during a conversation with Jill Banfield I learned that her group was making similar puzzling observations, and these results didn't make sense to them either. Then we knew it was the assemblers that were likely in the wrong, not us. So we decided to dig deeper. This study is the result of that. Long reads, especially those from PacBio, are great. And long-read assemblers generally do a great job. For which we can't thank the developers of these algorithms enough as they are the heroes here who take on the notoriously difficult technical task of metagenomic assembly to help us push the boundaries of what we can learn from complex environments. BUT we also know now that it is not uncommon to find in the long-read assembly results multi-domain chimeras, prematurely circularized sequences, haplotyping errors, excessive repeats, and even phantom sequences that don't match any of the input long-reads. If you think you are in the same boat with us, please read our study here, https://lnkd.in/efgTSM2z find our bioinformatics workflow that supports the findings in this study here, https://lnkd.in/e358_AfK or skim through the BlueSky thread by Florian Trigodet that shares some pretty figures here: https://lnkd.in/eu2YUfyW Thank you! 😇

5th HIFMB symposium: Your ticket to talks, discussions, early career program, art and more. Registration is free of charge. ➡️ www.hifmb.de/symp25 #marinebiodiversity

Yesterday was Zukunftstag in Germany. This is a day where schoolchildren broaden their career horizons by visiting workplaces and learning about different professions particularly in fields where their genders are underrepresented. But how do you explain the complexities of supporting decision making in an active and sensorial way? PolarGoal was designed to explain Antarctic diplomacy and policymaking by overcoming all barriers (including the English-German language ones). My super special thanks to @Dr. Jonathan Baldwin (who conceived the game with me); to Callum Shingleton-Smith who embraced this idea, designing and fabricating PolarGoal at Royal Holloway, University of London's Electric Engineering Department; to the whole team of HIFMB for organising this beautiful day (Sophie Eggert and Leah-Celine Brade in particular); and to Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions for enabling my research to impact younger generations in so many different ways 😊 #MSCA #Antarctica #Zukunftstag #PolarRegions #Policymaking

Full job description here ➡️ https://lnkd.in/eT3auiuR #jobsinscience #marineresearch #marinebiodiversity #masterthesis