Metabarcoding has revolutionised the field of protist diversity and ecology over the last decade, and numerous studies have generated large sequence data targeting the V4 and V9 hyper variable regions of the 18S gene. However, these data have seldom been used to investigate questions of an evolutionary nature, in part because the short V4 and V9 sequences have reduced phylogenetic signal.
In this talk, I hope to show that metabarcoding data is an invaluable resource for answering evolutionary questions. I will summarise some of the work we have done to investigate habitat transitions across protist clades, and some ongoing work studying niche evolution in ciliates.
Mahwash Jamy, Swedish Research Council (VR) Postdoctoral Fellow from the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences in Uppsala