SciLifeLab’s Planetary Biology capability is sprung out of a need for trans-disciplinary and coordinated approaches to study life on earth, with a broad scope ranging from single molecules and cells to individual species, species communities, ecosystems, and their functioning on the planet. Simply speaking ”Life in environmental context”.
By combining SciLifeLab infrastructure, and the data-driven life science approach with a focus on planetary biology, the capability will create opportunities with a strong impact on ecosystem science. Taking advantage of SciLifeLab’s national research infrastructure, technology, and scientific excellence, techniques such as imaging, microscopy, genomics, bioinformatics, metabolomics, proteomics, and big data analysis, for non-biomedical research will be used to shed light on all aspects of life on our planet.
The Planetary Biology capability kicked off with a joint SciLifeLab/EMBL workshop on the 16 and 17th of May 2022 in Heidelberg.
The workshop included talks on a broad set of themes including:
*Biodiversity genomics and reference genome sequencing
*Ecology and evolution
*Biogeochemistry & ecosystems
*Data driven planetary biology
Scientific leads for the SciLifeLab Planetary Biology capability appointed
“We hope to bridge the gap between researchers working in different disciplines: conservation, population genetics, taxonomy, evolution, metagenomics, biogeochemistry, and so on, to create a strong environment for studying ecosystems as a whole” says Olga Vinnere Pettersson
“This entails more extensive and efficient use of the full portfolio of molecular biosciences methods and infrastructure for planetary biology, with the ambition of providing deep and mechanistic understanding of how different populations, communities and ecosystems function and interact with each other and the earth system” says Stefan Bertilsson.
Olga Vinnere Petterson and Stefan Bertilsson
Contact persons
Scientific leads for SciLifeLab Planetary Biology are Olga Vinnere Petterson, Stefan Bertilsson.
Assigned scientific co-leads are Anders Andersson, Nathaniel Street and Jacob Höglund. Please reach out with any questions or research collaboration inquiries .