The global pandemic has been an unfortunate consequence of the COVID-19 outbreak, which affected numerous sectors of our everyday life. Now, a few months after it all began, the IGNITE PhD students share how the pandemic and the resulting lockdown affected their work and life. Fortunately, although being restricted from laboratory access, the majority of the students’ work has not been severely affected. By utilising numerous means of virtu... show more

“Omics” studies explore the biology of organisms by studying their different molecular components. Hence, omics data can include information about the genome itself ((meta)genomics), transcription products ((meta)transcriptomics), protein products ((meta)proteomics), metabolic products ((meta)metabolomics) and more. Most of the projects in IGNITE aim to generate and analyse omics datasets as part of their research into the phylogeneti... show more

A new approach towards bridging the gap between biodiversity data and published narrative has been developed within the framework of IGNITE. With the application of semantic technologies, the novel system OpenBioDiv provides a long-anticipated mechanism for storage and management of diverse information of particular importance for biology.  Hundreds of years of biodiversity research have resulted in the accumulation of a... show more

Stylommatophora is one of the most speciose orders of Gastropoda, including terrestrial snails and slugs, some of which are economically important as human food, agricultural pests, vectors of parasites or due to invasiveness. Despite their great diversity and relevance, the internal phylogeny of Stylommatophora has been debated. To date, only 34 stylommatophoran mitogenomes were sequenced. In this study, the complete mitogenome of an invasive... show more

Contribution by our ESR Mariya Dimitrova, who is working on ESR Project 15: Semantic publication, dissemination, visualization and re-use of biodiversity-related genomic and metagenomic data. Last month, a research visit of Dr. Pier Luigi But­ti­gieg and his student Raïssa Meyer from Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology (MPI) to Pensoft took place. This visit laid the groundwork for future col... show more