Plenary speakers
Friday 6 May
Sofie Derycke
Sofie Derycke is a molecular ecologist working as senior scientist in the marine genomics group at ILVO. She uses and explores molecular tools to study the ecology and evolution of marine organisms, and is particularly interested in understanding how the environment (including human induced pressures) shapes population genomic variation, community composition and organismal responses. She explores the use of metabarcoding for identification of macrobenthic and meiobenthic communities related to impact assessment and monitoring of the marine environment by generating reliable reference databases and by comparing different marker genes and bioinformatic pipelines. Her aim is to investigate ecosystem functioning and to understand what metabarcoding data can and cannot teach us about community structure and how we can improve DNA-based methods for diversity assessment.