Biodiversity seen through the perspective of insects: 10 simple rules on methodological choices and experimental design for genomic studies

Pável Matos-Maraví; Camila Duarte Ritter; Christopher J Barnes; Martin Nielsen; Urban Olsson; Niklas Wahlberg; Daniel Marquina; Ilari Sääksjärvi; Alexandre Antonelli

doi:10.7287/peerj.preprints.26661v3

Biodiversity seen through the perspective of insects: 10 simple rules on methodological choices and experimental design for genomic studies

Pável Matos-Maraví ^1,2, Camila Duarte Ritter³, Christopher J Barnes⁴, Martin Nielsen^4,5, Urban Olsson^1,2, Niklas Wahlberg⁶, Daniel Marquina^7,8, Ilari Sääksjärvi⁹, Alexandre Antonelli^1,2,10

1 Department of Biological and Environmental Sciences, University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden

2 Gothenburg Global Biodiversity Centre, Gothenburg, Sweden

3 Department of Eukaryotic Microbiology, University of Duisburg-Essen, Essen, Germany

4 Natural History Museum of Denmark, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

5 Section for Evolutionary Genomics, Department of Biology, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

6 Department of Biology, Lund University, Lund, Sweden

7 Department of Bioinformatics and Genetics, Swedish Museum of Natural History, Stockholm, Sweden

8 Department of Zoology, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden

9 Biodiversity Unit, University of Turku, Turku, Finland

10 Royal Botanical Garden, Kew, Richmond, Surrey, United Kingdom

DOI: 10.7287/peerj.preprints.26661v3

Published: 2019-03-01
Accepted: 2019-03-01

Subject Areas: Biodiversity, Entomology, Evolutionary Studies, Genomics, Zoology
Keywords: Biodiversity, evolution, taxonomic impediment, museomics, NGS

Copyright: © 2019 Matos-Maraví et al.
Licence: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.

Cite this article: Matos-Maraví P, Duarte Ritter C, Barnes CJ, Nielsen M, Olsson U, Wahlberg N, Marquina D, Sääksjärvi I, Antonelli A. 2019. Biodiversity seen through the perspective of insects: 10 simple rules on methodological choices and experimental design for genomic studies. PeerJ Preprints 7:e26661v3 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.26661v3

Abstract

Massively parallel DNA sequencing opens up opportunities for bridging multiple temporal and spatial dimensions in biodiversity research, thanks to its efficiency to recover millions of nucleotide polymorphisms. Here we identify the current status, discuss the main challenges, and look into future perspectives on biodiversity genomics focusing on insects, which arguably constitute the most diverse and ecologically important group among all animals. We suggest 10 simple rules that provide a succinct step-by-step guide and best-practices to anyone interested in biodiversity research through the study of insect genomics. To this end, we review relevant literature on biodiversity and evolutionary research in the field of entomology. Our compilation is targeted at researchers and students who may not yet be specialists in entomology or molecular biology. We foresee that the genomic revolution and its application to the study of non-model insect lineages will represent a major leap to our understanding of insect diversity.