Marine biodiversity multi-omics: Bioinformatics pipeline and long-read sequencing optimization

Marine biodiversity is huge and the latest findings reveal a new world of so far unexpected functions and dynamics. Moreover, biodiversity plays a critical role in the understanding of global change (especially the overexploitation of living resources, habitat loss and climate change). Technological developments such as autonomous field deployed robots and high-throughput sequencing have contributed significantly to advances in marine biodiversity research. As a consequence, omics data of non-model organisms are expanding exponentially. At the same time expectations of society for the use of these data is increasing. However, routine data banking and data analysis remains a challenge because of the lack of adapted bioinformatic protocols and trained staff. In this project a young researcher will be trained in the development and adaptation of bioinformatic protocols and pipelines in the field of marine biodiversity multi-omics. We refer specifically to DNA metabarcoding and eDNA, DNA metagenomics, reduced representation sequencing, skim (whole genome) sequencing and the later integration of functional regions of genomes (transcriptomics and proteomics). The integration of short (Illumina) and long-read (PacBio, Oxford Nanopore) technology is an additional integrative level of the research plan. The project fits in the context of the European Marine Biological Research Center (www.embrc.be), the expertise at LBEG and the bioinformatics hub of the Genomics Core.