Objectives: Biodiversity inventorying and environmental monitoring is currently based on traditional identification methods, which are expensive, slow and limited by available expertise. Metagenomic techniques promise to completely revolutionize biodiversity inventorying and environmental monitoring of the big four. This project targets a number of challenges that remain in the development of techniques that allow accurate qualitative and quantitative identification of environmental samples.
Expected Results: 1) New and improved metagenomic methods for qualitative and quantitative analysis of insect faunas based on environmental samples. 2) New insights into the size and composition of European insect faunas. 3) Phylogenomic analysis of the origin and assembly of European insect faunas.
Researching student: Daniel Marquina