Dr Morek is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Wellcome Sanger Institute, who studies microscopic animals, with a primary focus on tardigrades, which are famous for tolerance of extreme environmental conditions. His research aims to trace the evolutionary history of that tolerance and uncover the genomic foundations of this remarkable trait. Using cutting-edge molecular and genomic methods, he investigates how this trait has evolved across tardigrade lineages.
In his talk, “Sequencing the Unsequenceable: Comparative Genomics of Tardigrades” Dr Morek will present the Picogram Input Multimodal Sequencing (PiMmS) method, which enables long-read genome sequencing from single meiofaunal specimens, and discuss the evolution of proteins linked to extreme tolerance.