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SUMMARY:EESS talk on "Environmental DNA metabarcoding as a new tool for bi
 omonitoring: promises and challenges"
DTSTART:20160322T121500
DTEND:20160322T131500
DTSTAMP:20260413T224134Z
UID:e395504e127a17b094fafee90aff6f974801329228a881fac2060d8d
CATEGORIES:Conferences - Seminars
DESCRIPTION:Dr Jan Pawlowski\, Lab for Molecular evolution and ecology of 
 protists\, University of Geneva\, CH\nAbstract:\nBiodiversity surveys are 
 commonly used for the environmental impact assessment and biomonitoring of
  aquatic ecosystems. Traditional monitoring is based on morphotaxonomic in
 ventories of biological communities\, which are time-consuming\, expensive
  and require excellent taxonomic expertise. The eDNA metabarcoding offer a
  powerful tool to describe the biodiversity in environmental samples. Howe
 ver\, the capacity of metabarcoding to meet the quality standards of bioin
 dication is subject of controversy.\nIn my talk\, I will present our pilot
  studies evaluating the potential of eDNA metabarcoding for the assessment
  of the quality of aquatic ecosystems. We compare the morpho-taxonomic and
  eDNA data for different groups of freshwater and marine bioindicators (di
 atoms\, oligochaetes\, benthic macro- and meiofauna). The results are very
  promising showing a significant correlation between biotic indices inferr
 ed from morphological and molecular data\, despite gaps in the reference d
 atabase and variations in relative abundance of analysed species. Although
  some challenging issues still need to be solved\, the molecular approach 
 appears as a promising tool for more sensitive and cost and time effective
  environmental monitoring in the future.Short biography:\nJan Pawlowski is
  a Professor of Biology at the Department of Genetics and Evolution\, Univ
 ersity of Geneva.  He is leading the research group on molecular evolutio
 n and ecology of microbial eukaryotes. Large part of his activities is dev
 oted to DNA barcoding. Currently\, he is working on the development of eco
 -genomic tests for biomonitoring and survey of aquatic ecosystems. He is t
 he chair of the Swiss Barcode of Life (SwissBOL) and the founder of ID-Gen
 e ecodiagnostics Ltd.
LOCATION:GR C0 01 http://plan.epfl.ch/?room=GR%20C0%2001
STATUS:CONFIRMED
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