MERG - Universitetet i Oslo

Impact factor
The two papers published in 2011 with highest impact
factor (IF) were:
• Buntgen U, Kauserud H, Egli S. 2011. Linking climate
variability to mushroom productivity and phenology.
Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, in press
(IF: 8.8)
• Eastwood et al. 2011. The Plant Cell Wall‚ Decomposing
Machinery Underlies the Functional Diversity
of Forest Fungi. Science 333, 762 (IF: 31)
All 2011 publications see the appendix 2.
Highly cited papers
In 2011 two articles were on the top cited articles in two
international peer reviewed journals. Burki et al. 2008
and 2009 are currently at top cited list in Biology Letters
Genome Biology and Evolution.
• Burki, F; Shalchian-Tabrizi, Kamran & Pawlowski, J
(2008). Phylogenomics reveals a new ‘megagroup’
including most photosynthetic eukaryotes. Biology
Letters. ISSN 1744-9561. 4, s 366- 369 . doi:
10.1098/rsbl.2008.0224
• Burki, Fabien; Inagaki, Yuji; Bråte, Jon; Archibald,
John M; Keeling, Patrick J; Cavalier-Smith, Thomas;
Sakaguchi, Miako et al. (2009). Large-Scale Phylogenomic
Analyses Reveal That Two Enigmatic Protist
Lineages, Telonemia and Centroheliozoa, Are Related
to Photosynthetic Chromalveolates. Genome
Biology and Evolution. ISSN 1759-6653. 1(1), s
231-238 . doi: 10.1093/gbe/evp022
research and serVice aPPlications
In 2011 MERG staff took part in 11 larger grant applications
to national and international grant offices. These
are the following highlight:
Centre of Excellence (CoE)
MERG applied for a Centre of Excellence named Centre
for Integrative Microbiology (CIM) together with three
other microbial biology research groups at the University
of Oslo (Glyconor, LaMDa, MERG and Tone Tønjumgroup)
and external collaborators to maximize the potential
synergies. The assessment gave an overall score
excellent. The outcome of the prequalification round will
be announced in May 2012.
ERC starting grant application
In November 2011 Håvard Kauserud submitted an ERC
starting grant application to the European Research
Council entitled “Linking microbial communities in boreal
forest soils to plant diversity and productivity – a
metagenomics approach”. The goal of this project is to
make fundamental progress in the understanding of the
community ecology of microorganisms in boreal forest
soils and how they are organized spatiotemporally. The
diversity, composition and activity of microbial communities
will be related to the diversity and productivity of
co-occurring plants.
Grants from Research Council of Norway and UiO
Project leader Dag Klaveness, got funded the project:
“X-cell parasites: an emerging threat to marine fish”. This
project is a collaboration with Kamran Shalchian-Tabrizi,
Mark Freeman, University of Malaya, David Bass, Natural
History Museum, London and Håkon Hansen, Norwegian
Veterinary Institute, Norway.
The project ”Regulatory RNA and the origin of animal
multicellularity” got funded by an UiO PhD position (Ralf
Neumann) and a, postdoc position to Jon Bråte. The
projects aims to investigate whether the RNAi machinery
was lost from the genomes of single-celled ancestors
of animals multiple times and if the miRNA pathway
evolved independently in animals with respect to other
eukaryotic supergroups.
All scientific project see the appendix 1
high PerforMance coMPuting
The capabilities of the Bioportal will be expanded to meet
the Life Science users’ computational needs. The major
objective with the requested project from NOTUR is to
implement the Galaxy infrastructure at the computational
resources at UiO and develop this system to handle
jobs from the Bioportal. Porting jobs from the Bioportal
to the Galaxy system will have several advantages. This
project is a collaboration between BIO, USIT and CLSi.
eValuation
In the BIO-fag evaluation from 2010 the research program
MERG got a good – very good score. The BIO-fag
evaluation is based on achievement from 2000-2009.
infrastructure
The Microlab facility at Department of Biology was
opened in December 2011. The facility is designed and
managed by MERG. The Microlab is established for
storage and growth of microbial cells of prokaryotes
and eukaryotes species a well as virus, and other kinds
of cell tissues from multicellular organisms such as animals
and plant. The Microlab will be used for research
on algea, fungi, protozoa, several bacteria strains and
salmon cells. More about this infrastructure see MERG
web-pages.
new web-Pages
New MERG web pages have been made - see
http://www.merg.uio.no
new coMMunication Profile for Merg
New profile including power-points, posters, newsletters,
colour pallet and elements was ready September
2011. This is intended for MERG internal and external
use.
all achieVeMent 2011 in the JiPPi rePort
Activities in MERG has been reported in the JIPPI, more
information about JIPPI and the activities in MERG 2011,
see appendix 2.