Publications by authors named "Emmanouil Meramveliotakis"
Article Synopsis
- The study examines how habitat types influence the evolutionary dynamics of two flightless lineages of beetles (Eutagenia) in the Cyclades islands, focusing on their dispersal rates and population genetics.
- Findings reveal that the lineage living in dynamic sandy habitats experiences greater inter-island gene flow and consistent population bottlenecks, suggesting a cycle of local extinction and recolonization.
- The research challenges the Habitat Constraint hypothesis by highlighting that factors other than selection on dispersal traits also contribute to evolutionary differences between species adapted to stable and unstable environments.
Article Synopsis
- * A new eco-evolutionary simulation model leverages metabarcoding data to analyze community assembly dynamics, predicting species abundance, genetic variation, and other community characteristics across various environmental conditions.
- * The model was tested on soil microarthropod data from Cyprus, revealing that community structures in different habitats are influenced by either neutral processes or abiotic filters, with the findings available through the ibiogen R package.
Article Synopsis
- Current research on island biodiversity mainly focuses on plants and birds, neglecting arthropods despite their species richness and importance in understanding ecological processes.
- Novel high throughput sequencing (HTS) technologies are now available, which could enhance the data collection on arthropods and provide deeper insights into biodiversity dynamics.
- The study suggests integrating HTS with deep learning image analysis to improve arthropod biodiversity monitoring and proposes setting up an Island Genomic Observatories Network (iGON) to support collaborative efforts in island ecology, evolution, and conservation.
Metazoan metabarcoding is emerging as an essential strategy for inventorying biodiversity, with diverse projects currently generating massive quantities of community-level data. The potential for integrating across such data sets offers new opportunities to better understand biodiversity and how it might respond to global change. However, large-scale syntheses may be compromised if metabarcoding workflows differ from each other.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDisentangling the relative role of environmental filtering and spatial processes in driving metacommunity structure across mountainous regions remains challenging, as the way we quantify spatial connectivity in topographically and environmentally heterogeneous landscapes can influence our perception of which process predominates. More empirical data sets are required to account for taxon- and context-dependency, but relevant research in understudied areas is often compromised by the taxonomic impediment. Here we used haplotype-level community DNA metabarcoding, enabled by stringent filtering of amplicon sequence variants (ASVs), to characterize metacommunity structure of soil microarthropod assemblages across a mosaic of five forest habitats on the Troodos mountain range in Cyprus.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFArticle Synopsis
- The study focuses on the growing field of metabarcoding using DNA from whole organism community samples (wocDNA) to analyze diverse metazoan communities across various environments.
- It highlights the significant developments in sampling and laboratory protocols but points out the lack of consistency in bioinformatic methods being used, reviewing over 600 papers and identifying 111 that utilized COI metabarcoding of wocDNA.
- The authors found high variability in methodologies, limited adaptation of bioinformatic procedures, and underreporting of details, and they suggest recommendations to improve the comparability and effectiveness of these bioinformatic methods for biodiversity research.
High-throughput sequencing (HTS) is increasingly being used for the characterization and monitoring of biodiversity. If applied in a structured way, across broad geographical scales, it offers the potential for a much deeper understanding of global biodiversity through the integration of massive quantities of molecular inventory data generated independently at local, regional and global scales. The universality, reliability and efficiency of HTS data can potentially facilitate the seamless linking of data among species assemblages from different sites, at different hierarchical levels of diversity, for any taxonomic group and regardless of prior taxonomic knowledge.
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