Oslo buzzed with the excitement of 120 biodiversity researchers from across Norway and beyond on February 8-10th, when the inaugural Norwegian Biodiversity & Genomics Conference was held at the University of Oslo’s Tøyen and downtown campuses. Thirty-one institutions spanning the university, research institute, state agency, and private sectors were represented. While most participants came from nearby Oslo and Ås, some came from as far as Spain and Finland, while Norway was represented from Svalbard to Sørlandet.
Wordcloud of institutions participating in the first Norwegian Biodiversity & Genomics Conference.
Participants represented a variety of career stages, from the bachelor to the professional levels. About half of the participants were students and postdocs. All were united around a shared interest in Norwegian biodiversity and how DNA sequencing can help us to understand, maintain, and harness it for the wellbeing of society.
Distribution of conference attendees among career stages.
Sharing skills and generating discussion through workshops
The meeting kicked off with two full-day workshops on the grounds of the Natural History Museum Oslo at Tøyen. Both workshops were fully subscribed.
Twenty researchers assembled the genome of the coleseed sawfly in the Genome Assembly, Validation, and Curation Workshop at Lids Hus led by researchers Dr. Ole K. Tørresen and Benedicte Garmann-Aarhus from the Earth BioGenome Project Norway. The participants received hands-on introductions to the different types of data used for assembling high-quality genome assemblies, in addition to the programs that are used to create, validate, and curate genome assemblies that reach the global standards of the Earth Biogenome Project. Researchers from all the major universities in Norway participated in the workshop.
Participants in both workshops got to know each other during joint coffee and lunch breaks. Photo credit: Alexander Kopatz.
Another 50 participants attended the Genetic Diversity Monitoring Workshop led by Dr. Joost Raeymaekers (Nord University) and Dr. Alexander Kopatz (Norwegian Institute for Nature Research) funded by the COST Action CA18134 Genomic Biodiversity Knowledge for Resilient Ecosystems “G-BiKE”. The workshop began with a world-class line-up of keynote speakers including Dr. Linda Laikre (Stockholm University, Sweden), Dr. Joachim Mergeay (Research Institute for Nature and Forest and KU Leuven, Belgium), Dr. Sunniva Aagaard (Norwegian Environment Agency/Miljødirektorat), and Dr. Anders Nielsen (Norwegian Institute of Bioeconomy Research). The Chair of G-BiKE, Dr. Cristiano Vernesi (Fondazione Edmund Mach, Italy), emphasized the work the COST action is doing to bring the state-of-the-art of genetic biodiversity monitoring to wildlife managers across Europe.
Keynote speaker Dr. Linda Laikre (Stockholm University, Sweden) kicking off the Genetic Diversity Monitoring Workshop with updates from the UN Biodiversity Conference (COP15) held in Montreal in December 2022. Photo credit: Alexander Kopatz.
The Genetic Diversity Monitoring Workshop’s afternoon discussion sought to answer: Why is genetic monitoring needed and how can it be implemented in a Norwegian context? The conversation covered a wide range of topics, from the pros and cons of different biodiversity monitoring tools, to the communication of genetic diversity information to policy-makers and the public.
Day 1 ended with a fascinating public lecture on Arctic sled dog evolution by Dr. Mikkel Sinding from the University of Copenhagen (in Danish). The Klimahuset was the perfect setting for this intrepid tale of adapting to harsh environmental conditions. A gardener from the Botanical Garden happily took home a prize after correctly answering a question about the origin of one of the dog breeds.
Dr. Mikkel Sinding from the University of Copenhagen shared the fascinating tale of Arctic sled dog evolution during a public lecture at Klimahuset. Photo credit: Rebekah Oomen.
Sharing knowledge of Norwegian biodiversity
Why are museum collections key to anchoring reference genome databases with taxonomic knowledge? What environmental factors drive the distribution of fungi phyla across Norway? How can pan-genomes reveal previously hidden structural genomic variants associated with environmental adaptation in Atlantic salmon? These were just some of the many questions answered during the keynote and contributed talks on conference days 2 and 3.
Speakers and organizers of the Norwegian Biodiversity & Genomics Conference 2023. Photo credit: Christoffer Hals, Digital Life Norway.
Day 2 began with an inspiring keynote by Dr. Mark Blaxter, Head of the Tree of Life Programme at the Wellcome Sanger Institute in the UK and nematode enthusiast (his slides can be viewed here). The following session on invertebrate species was short-lived because so few abstracts focused on invertebrates were submitted relative to the number of abstracts focused on vertebrates, highlighting a need for more research in Norway on this diverse group of taxa that is responsible for so many vital ecosystem functions.
Dr. Mark Blaxter, Head of the Tree of Life Programme at the Wellcome Sanger Institute, sharing his vision for “sequencing everything”. Photo credit: Christoffer Hals, Digital Life Norway.
The rest of Day 2 was filled with cutting-edge research on perhaps the most well-studied group of organisms, vertebrates. The keynote talk by Dr. Astrid Böhne from the Zoological Research Museum Alexander Koenig, Germany on sex chromosome evolution in cichlids and the development of sampling standards for the European Reference Genome Atlas (ERGA) was a highlight.
Dr. Astrid Böhne, Zoological Research Museum Alexander Koenig, sharing her group’s research on cichlid fish evolution. Photo credit: Rebekah Oomen.
After 12 contributed talks in addition to the keynotes, the second day ended with food, games, and sharing ideas late into the night at the conference dinner party at Grønland Boulebar.
Everyone enjoyed some rounds of boule and arcade games during the conference dinner party at Grønland Boulebar. Photo credit: Rebekah Oomen.
The final day provided a glimpse into the fascinating sex lives of fungi by keynote speaker Dr. Inger Skrede from the University of Oslo, followed by a diverse session on the varieties of fungi and their genomes across Norway and beyond.
Dr. Inger Skrede giving her keynote lecture on mating, divergence and speciation in wood decay fungi. Photo credit: Rebekah Oomen.
The last session of the conference was devoted to plants, from forests in Norway, Africa, and the Galápagos, to herbaria in Norway and the UK. In this context, Dr. Paul Kersey from the Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew, presented their cutting edge approach to combining genomics and digital technologies to revitalize natural history collections.
Dr. Paul Kersey, Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew, on natural history collections in the digital age. Photo credit: Rebekah Oomen.
National genome sequencing initiatives meet in-person for the first time
The conference served as a meeting ground for not one, but two national initiatives aimed at sequencing genomes of Norwegian biodiversity - the European Reference Genome Atlas (ERGA) Norway and the Earth BioGenome Project Norway (EBP-Nor). The national branch of the bottom-up pan-European ERGA initiative, led by Dr. Torsten Struck and Dr. Rebekah Oomen, met for the first time to update the community on ongoing initiatives and ways to become involved in ERGA and ERGA-Norway. Dr. Struck invited new members to ERGA with an introductory lecture and a call for nominations for a new Council Representative for Norway. Dr. Oomen introduced the new pan-European project Biodiversity Genomics Europe, funded by Horizon Europe, which unites the reference genome and DNA barcoding communities across Europe towards tackling biodiversity decline (slides available here).
The final event of the conference was a meeting of current and future members of the Earth BioGenome Project Norway (EBP-Nor), funded by the Research Council of Norway and led by Dr. Kjetill S. Jakobsen of the University of Oslo. Progress on the “launch phase” of the initiative (currently >50 genomes sequenced) and laying the groundwork for “scaling up” reference genome generation towards Phase II were the main topics, in addition to welcoming new research institutes, universities, and industrial actors to contribute to the national “dugnad” of sequencing all eukaryotic species in Norway. Earlier in the conference, Dr. Jakobsen presented EBP-Nor in plenary (slides available here).
Where do we go from here?
We would like to hear from the Norwegian biodiversity and genomics community: Should this conference happen regularly? How often? Who should host and participate? Any other feedback for the future? Please share your comments here (the form will be open until 30.04.23).
A joint effort
The first Norwegian Biodiversity & Genomics Conference was funded by UiO:Life Science and the Research Council of Norway projects Earth BioGenome Project Norway (EBP-Nor) and InvertOmics. The Genetic Diversity Monitoring Workshop was supported by the COST Action CA18134 - Genomic BIodiversity Knowledge for Resilient Ecosystems "G-BIKE”. Additional support was provided by ERGA-Norway, Digital Life Norway, and Elixir Norway.
