Introduction

Due to the rapid advances in sequencing technology, biology is experiencing a transformation to a big-data science. This allows us to obtain genome-level information for almost any species on Earth now at an unprecedented quality level of completeness and continuity. This opens entire new opportunities for biodiversity research and CEG is at the forefront of this development being part of different international and national collaborations employing genomics.

Key research questions of CEG focus on biodiversity and systematics of mainly invertebrate groups using comparative approaches in an evolutionary and/or ecological context. Emphasis is usually on the marine realm, but also on terrestrial insects.

CEG members are interested in the evolution of populations and species differentiation with a particular interest in understanding cryptic species and the phenomenon of stasis. We also interested in a better understanding of genome evolution for these understudied groups. The main applications comprise of molecular biology, phylogenomics, and comparative genomics methods. We also develop new bioinformatics tools aiming at minimizing the impact of artificial signals on analytical procedures.

The senior members of CEG also have scientific curator responsibility for some NHM collections.