Joint Experimental Molecular Unit (JEMU)

BarCoVer (for Barcoding Congolese Vertebrates) is conducting a DNA barcoding program on selected vertebrate groups from the Congo Basin: birds, fishes, and mammals (primates, Bovidae and rodents). It is based on the zoological collections of the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences (RBINS) and the Royal Museum for Central Africa (RMCA). This is the first flagship project of the Joint Experimental Molecular Unit (JEMU).

This project focuses on museum specimens of Pan troglodytes, Pan paniscus and Gorilla gorilla.

Summary will be available soon.

Ostracods are small bivalved crustaceans with an excellent fossil record over both long and short time frames. Molecular techniques for living ostracods have been optimized and applied to various non-marine ostracods groups. However, there is also vast material available from ancient ostracods: Ostracod valves (and more rarely, remnants of soft parts) accumulate in lake sediments, and these fossils are used for palaeoclimatic and palaeoecological reconstructions.

Larvae of the sawfly Pseudodineura (Hymenoptera, Tenthredinidae, Nematinae) emit volatiles from defensive glands. The major compound of the glandular secretion is a terpenoid, citral, as shown by chemical analyses of seven Pseudodineura species. The terpenoid dolichodial is known from other Nematinae species. The aim of the project is to reconstruct a phylogenetic tree for Pseudodieura species plus outgroup species with the mitochondrial genes Cytb and CoI.

The use of natural history specimens to produce DNA barcodes is hampered by a number of conditions not directly related to the taxon itself. One of them is the age of the specimens. Currently a project is ongoing to develop DNA barcodes for fruit flies (Diptera, Tephritidae) using dry pinned specimens from natural history collections to a large extent. Results so far show that, when standard protocols are being applied, there is a strong decline in positive results with increasing age, rendering material older than 10 years only efficient for 12%.

The project aims at the barcoding of specimens of the widely distributed Afrotropical species Pardosa injucunda which is suspected to contain several cryptic species. The collections of MRAC contain a large number of specimens with a wide variation of preservation history and are thus the ideal starting point to verify the feasibility of DNA extraction from ethanol collections with different age and at the same time to examine the assumed polyspecificity of the morphospecies.

The genus Eudasychira Möschler, 1887 (Lepidoptera, Noctuoidea, Lymantriidae) is a genus of moths which was recently revised and counts 37 species all of which are Afrotropical. Their male genitalia are very complex and a unique feature clearly shows that the genus is certainly monophyletic.

Recently, very interesting data have been found on their geographic distribution and presented in an European congress. Now a phylogeny on species level is ongoing using characters of the male genitalia. Molecular data could provide additional data to document this phylogeny.

Recently, the ANDEEP (Antarctic Deep Sea Biodiversity) campaigns have explored the Antarctic deep sea basins for the first time and a large number of amphipod crustacean samples were collected for morphology and DNA studies, complementing the existing collections at the RBINS of samples originating from the Antarctic continental shelf.