Ben Price

First look at the "flight" of dragonflies for the @royalsociety summer exhibition "Nurturing nature's innovations" next week. Come visit our stand: royalsociety.org/science-events… - an @NHM_London and @imperialcollege collaboration.

Our NERC funded project on Antarctic Krill with @NHM_Science starts today! See details here nhm.ac.uk/discover/news/…

Our latest study developing a Snakemake framework for the assembly and phylogenetic analysis of mitochondrial and ribosomal sequences from genome skims of museum collections is now published in @molecology with @NHM_Science onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.11…

🚨Job Alert: Are you a bioinformatics geek? familiar with ancient/historical DNA data? Do you want to join Kew Mycology to analyse fungal genomes of very old specimens? check our vacancies! careers.kew.org/vacancy/bioinf… careers.kew.org/vacancy/senior… #fungal #genomics #museomics

Excited to share the final chapter of my PhD thesis has been published! 🎉 Country-wide DNA metabarcoding is now a reality, thanks to key advancements. Big thanks to my co-authors and all who supported me! @leeselab @Senckenberg Link: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/17…

🚨 EntoSieve: New automated tool for fast, accurate size-sorting of bulk insect samples! Perfect for boosting DNA megabarcoding & metabarcoding projects. 🧬🔬 DIY low-cost device, gentle on specimens and yet efficient 🦋🐞read here: authorea.com/users/836612/a…

Are you attending #iBOL2024? Did you want to learn more about barcoding with nanopores? Register to attend the pre-conference workshop. Space is limited! dnabarcodingconference.com @eZakhar0v @ento_ben @Elza74649502 @CBG_UofG

OPPORTUNITY! We are recruiting an exceptional leader for NHM Collections: Director of Collections: You'll lead a dedicated team, spearhead strategy for the future of collections, drive access and research, and ensure success of our multi-site expansion nature.com/naturecareers/…

🚨 Job Alert! 🚨 Naturalis is hiring two tenure-track researchers. We're looking for experts who want to integrate molecular techniques, imaging, and data science (AI) to advance species recognition and detection. Apply here: naturalis.nl/en/about-us/jo…. #Biodiversity #metabarcoding

If you want something super simple and reasonably priced, microCLEAN may be worth trying: microzone.co.uk/shop/post-ampl… (I would love to know how it works in terms of chemistry!). Or you could try a cheap magnetic bead cleanup with reagents and magnet rack, possibly cheapest and most accessible from sergilabsupplies.com/products/magne… haven’t tested these myself though). If you want something very inexpensive but more time consuming and have enough samples to warrant stocking up on PEG, salt, and ethanol, a PEG precipitation may be useful, e.g.: sites.lsa.umich.edu/olsen-lab/wp-c… . You could also try a freeze-and-squeeze extraction method extracting from TAE gels, e.g. x.com/theBentoLab/st… There will also be other methods, e.g. homemade spin columns, bought spin columns with homemade reagents, etc. The question of which method would work best for you will probably depend on your own preferred balance of cost/speed/scalability/yield/reliability! Hope that helps!

Just updated BOLDigger2: By popular demand 🫡, BOLDigger2 now accepts BOLD credentials as optional arguments for seamless integration into existing bioinformatics pipelines. Update now at github.com/DominikBuchner…! #boldigger2 #update 💻

@kejames @iBOLEurope @iBOLConsortium @NHM_Science @NTNUnorway Thanks! Generating reference sequences and identifying individual unknown specimens.

How to efficiently implement #ONT for #DNAbarcoding applications? Join our webinar on June 6th to hear useful tips and discuss with experts from the @iBOLEurope community! iboleurope.org/june-6th-webin…

🚀 Excited to announce BOLDigger2! 🎉 Top 100 hits, better error handling, pipeline integration, faster downloads, tons of bug fixes, and BIN support. Check it out and feel free to share: github.com/DominikBuchner… #BOLDigger2 #upscaling @leeselab

Wow! Those libraries were clearly competing with each other 🤣

We’re sequencing the genomes of 10 endangered species with ORG.one live at London Calling! 🦁🦛🐛🐧🦆🐆🦌 Thanks to @NHM_London and @rzss for making this possible and helping to generate useful genomic data to support conservation efforts! #nanoporeconf

For even more individual voucher specimens on a MinION (100k!!) see this great paper by @iBOLConsortium biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

With >45,000 individual specimen barcodes generated in a single MinION run, sequencing is no longer the hard / expensive part of doing DNA based biomonitoring!

The samples were shipped to @SangerToL and non-destructively DNA extracted by @marakat’s team and @sangerinstitute Scientific Operations who then ran 92,160 PCRs (the protocol is a two step PCR carried out in 384-well plates).

These barcodes are from over 45,000 arthropod specimens held in 480 96-well plates, where each well contains a single specimen collected using Malaise traps by the wonderful partners participating in the @BIOSCAN_UK project led out of @SangerToL and @marakat’s group

Very exciting that the first live run of the MinION Mk1D device at #nanoporeconf has a huge and biodiverse amplicon pool, as this technology will facilitate much easier global access to high throughput biodiversity discovery and monitoring with DNA barcodes.