The Mediterranean Institute for Advanced Studies (IMEDEA), a joint Institute of the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC) and the Universitat de les Illes Balears (UIB), is leading this project. Its main research areas includes biodiversity, conservation, genetics, ecology, marine resources, climate change, and oceanography, especially in Posidonia oceanica meadows. Our scientific team is composed of four experts from complementary scientific areas:
Joan Pons (PI) is a tenured scientist at the CSIC since 2009 with more than 60 research articles indexed in the Science Citation Index (SCI). He is particularly interested in the evolution and phylogenetic patterns of metazoan lineages to shed light on biogeographic events driving their diversification based on genomes at low coverage, specially mitochondrial and chloroplastic genomes. He is also focussed in the study of genetic diversity at the species and population levels as well as species boundaries and cryptic species. Full publication list can be found in Publons.
Laura Botigué (coPI), awarded with the prestigious Ramón y Cajal Fellowship, is a young leading researcher in the Plant and Animal Genomics program at the Center for Research in Agricultural Genomics (CRAG) in Barcelona. She leads a group focused on bioinformatics and genome analysis and has 17 SCI articles mostly in high impact journals and the last ones are focused on plant genomics. Further information can be found at her institutional web.
Jorge Terrados is a tenured scientist at the CSIC since 2000 and he was the director of IMEDEA between 2016-2020. He published more than 87 SCI articles on the ecology of marine angiosperms, including Posidonia. He has led several research projects and contracts on the ecology and the rehabilitation of Posidonia meadows in the Balearic Islands.
Hugo de Boer, despite his youth, is Full Professor at the University of Oslo (UiO) with more than 125 publications. He is an expert in plant genetics and the characterization and sequencing of chloroplast genomes, as well as the taxonomic determination of plant samples from DNA sequences. He has 83 SCI articles in plant genomics, molecular identification, phylogenetics and metabarcoding. Further information can be found at his institutional web.
Additionally, IMEDEA as member of the Catalan Initiative for the Earth BioGenome Project (CBP) has the technical and bioinformatic support of the Centro Nacional de Análisis Genómico (CNAG) at Barcelona. This project would be developed under the umbrella of Earth Biogenome Project (EBP) and the European Reference Genome Atlas (ERGA) since CSIC and CBP are members of both initiatives.