Biomolecular Thematic Centre: recent advances and future perspectives

In the framework of LifeWatch Italy and in collaboration with other European Infrastructures such as ELIXIR and EMBRC, the research group involved in the Biomolecular Thematic Centre with the associated Laboratory (MoBiLab) has accomplished a number of actions and developed innovative tools and databases useful for molecular biodiversity monitoring and analyses. In the last year the upgrade of two bioinformatic tools and one biomolecular database, namely MSA-PAD, BioMaS and ITSoneDB, has been finalized. MSA-PAD is a multiple DNA aligner aimed at supporting evolutionary analyses through phylogeny inference. BioMaS is a taxonomic assignment pipeline able to classify High-Throughput Sequencing meta-barcoding data. ITSoneDB is a curated database of Eukaryotic ribosomal Internal Transcribed Spacer-1 (ITS1) sequences, appealing to use as reference to analyze meta-barcoding data. Currently, the MoBiLab team is developing new data retrieval and quality control tools for the animals' DNA barcode marker Cytochrome Oxidase sub-unit I (COXI) gene as well as for the chloroplast molecular markers rbcL, matK and trnH-psbA known as suitable DNA markers in plants. These tools will be released and published shortly and will be integrated in the LifeWatch infrastructure. All projects proposed to the call launched by LifeWatch Italy and supported by MoBiLab, focused on alien or invasive species, have been completed and the relevant results published in several cases in high-profile journals. Finally, the Biomolecular Thematic Centre team has been in charge in the organization of the 4th workshop focusing on the Species interaction's EBV class in the framework of the Globis B Project.