People

Principal Investigator

Nicolas is a molecular systematists, working both at the species and phylogenetic levels to understand the evolutionary dynamics of the conoideans and other members of the neogastropods. He is assistant professor in the MNHN, Paris, member of the team 3E in the Institut de Systématique, Evolution, Biodiversité (ISYEB).

Project Manager

Tanya is in charge of all the administrative tasks linked to the project, including the budget, the organization of the meeting, the missions, the data management plan, etc…

PhD student

Thomas’ PhD project is to design genetic markers to be sequenced on hundreds of specimens using an “exon capture” approach in order to resolve the phylogenetic relationships of the neogastropods.

Post-Doc

Sarah’s general research area is genomics and transcriptomics. She is interested in genome assembly and annotation, gene expression, and population genomics. Here, she is focusing on genome annotation of neogastropods and characterization of their molecular processes and features.

PhD student

Allan is a 2^nd year Master’s student from the “Bioinformatics” program at the Université de Lille. He is working on refining a bioinformatics pipeline to detect putative toxins in neogastropod transcriptomes. He will apply it to a dataset of transcriptomes available on the web or recently produced as part of the ERC project, in order to eventually detect new putative neogastropod toxins.

Alexander Fedosov is a zoologist with strong expertise in molecular systematics and bioinformatics. He is based in the Russian academy of Science, and is also a correspondent of the MNHN; his main interests are diversity and relationships of the Neogastropoda. His main role in the project – development of analytical pipeline and sampling design for exon-capture based phylogeny of the Neogastropoda.

Maria Vittoria Modica is an invertebrate zoologist, working on the anatomy, phylogeny and evolution of marine snails, with a special focus on the molecular basis of trophic adaptations and venom diversity. She is a research scientist at the Stazione Zoologica Anton Dohrn (SZN - Naples, Italy).

Yuri Kantor is a specialist in taxonomy, morphology and phylogeny of the Neogastropoda, in the Russian academy of Science; heis also a correspondent of the MNHN. His contribution is a selection of specimens for molecular studies, identification of the material, morphological and anatomical studies for identifying the evolutionary traits of neogastropods.

Manager of the neogastropod collection

Mélanie is in charge of curating all the biological material that will be studied in the framework of the project, including sorting, tissue-clipping, photographing and databasing thousands of samples.

Research ingeneer

Dario is taking care of the “Barcoding” task: it consists in sequencing the cox1 gene of a maximum of individuals, to propose species hypotheses that will be used to eventually describe new species and that will serve as a basis to select representatives for the neogastropod phylogeny.

Manager of the neogastropod collection

Claudia is in charge of curating all the biological material that will be studied in the framework of the project, including sorting, tissue-clipping, photographing and databasing thousands of samples.

Post-Doc

Alessandro is a bioinformatician, and his objective is to assemble and annotate the genomes that will be produce in the framework of the project, providing data for the other tasks of the projects (phylogeny, trait determinism, transcriptome annotation…).