BGE at the iBOL 2024 Conference

By Ela Sari

Biodiversity Genomics Europe is present at the 9th International Barcode of Life (iBOL) conference in Belém, Brazil on September 3-6th, 2024. This in-person conference, titled ‘Amazon homecoming: connecting people, barcodes, and biodiversity’, offers the global DNA-barcoding community an opportunity to reconnect. Participants will exchange cutting-edge scientific knowledge about the latest DNA barcoding and metabarcoding advancements for species identification.

The International Barcode of Life (iBOL) conference is back! After five years, the 9th iBOL conference is currently taking place with a wide range of interesting workshops and sessions. This year’s conference brings together prominent figures from the scientific community, government, conservation organizations, businesses and the financial sector. Among the distinguished plenary speakers is Peter Hollingsworth, BGE’s Deputy Director of the DNA Barcoding stream, who will be sharing his insights during the event.

Biodiversity Genomics Europe is actively participating in several of the 62 (!) engaging workshops and sessions during the conference. Among these, BGE’s Marius Eisele and Brent Emerson (CSIC, Spain) will be giving a talk about the results of the benchmarking of denoising tools that are used in metabarcode data processing. “Our presentation highlights how the standard denoising procedure, with any of the popular denoising tools, is keeping too much noise”, says Eisele. “That has been documented in other studies as well, but was never really quantified.”

Additionally, some of our BGE colleagues from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) and the Natural History Museum in London also host a session on genome skimming of historical Chironomidae (Diptera) types to solve inconsistencies in the barcode reference library. They will showcase their methodologies, share their findings, and provide examples of how inconsistencies in the barcode reference library could be solved.

An image of the Chironomidae types from NHM, London.

More information on BGE’s sessions will follow after the conference, so keep an eye on this website!