IPB University Researcher Presents Four Papers at iBOL 2019

IPB University researcher, Dr. Hawis Madduppa joined the 8th International Barcode of Life (iBOL), 17-20 June 2019 in Trondheim, Norway. This activity was attended by more than 450 participants coming from 60 countries. Dr. Hawis was the only participant from Indonesia.

On this occasion, this Anbiocore researcher presented four research results on the subject of Environmental DNA (eDNA) and Meta Barcoding, namely: 1) Interspecific dietary composition and niche overlap of grouper species from Raja Ampat reefs, 2) Dietary assessment of groupers in Raja Ampat: insight of DNA metabarcoding, 3) Revealing hidden diversity of planktonic organisms in Indonesian reef systems using environmental DNA, and 4) Detecting habitat and population structure of Halmaheran endemic walking shark using molecular approach.

Dr. Hawis revealed that current developments focus more on environmental DNA both from water and soil, and there are many recent software or pipelines for metabarcoding. The Anbiocore study funded by USAID SHERA and the Ministry of Research, Technology and Higher Education provided this approach to explore biodiversity in Indonesia which is known as the sea megabiodiversity area.

"We try to discover unknown species and their function in nature," said Dr Hawis who is also the Head of the Marine Biodiversity and Biosistematics Laboratory, Faculty of Fisheries and Marine Sciences, IPB University. Dr. Hawis also had the opportunity to attend a workshop on processing metabarcoding data, and to discuss about barcoding with various researchers from around the world. (*/ris/zsp)