Biobank

How to overcome this recent biodiversity dilemma and speed up the availability of material with undescribed diversity?!?

The BMBF-funded GBOL, the German Barcode of Life initiative, has been run successfully over the last eight years. It delivered an operative DNA barcode reference library for German animals, fungi and plants. However, a significant proportion of insect taxa has so far been excluded from GBOL and merely all biodiversity research, because no or only very insufficient expertise and information are available that allow to get a grip on them. They are called “Dark Taxa”.

Pollination is crucial for maintaining angiosperm biodiversity and represents one of the most important ecosystem services. With the increasing threats of massive insect decline, studying pollination and associated networks has become more important than ever. In this study, we target the plant-pollinator networks of two important crops (caraway and apple) using a combination of traditional methods with DNA barcoding and metabarcoding.

Insects are one of the most species-rich groups of metazoan organisms. They play a pivotal role in most non-marine ecosystems and many insect species are of enormous economical and medical importance. Unraveling the evolution of insects is essential for understanding how life in terrestrial and limnic environments evolved. The 1KITE (1K Insect Transcriptome Evolution) project aims to study the transcriptomes (that is the entirety of expressed genes) of 1,000 insect species encompassing all recognized insect orders. For each species, so-called ESTs (Expressed Sequence Tags) will be produced…

AMARE is designed to optimize the signal-to-noise ratio in AFLP data sets (single or multiple primer combinations). It identifies potentially erroneous AFLP genotyping errors as the number of non-reproducible scored markers between replicated AFLP profiles of single individuals. As a measure of overall data quality, it simultaneously estimates general replicate error rates.