Using museum specimens to understand recent population history in the moss carder bee
This month's ERGA BioGenome Analysis & Applications Seminar will feature two talks that showcase how museum specimens are revealing a roughly 25% decline in the genetic diversity of the moss carder bumblebee over the past century, and how the new Poll-A-Gen project is scaling this approach up to 16 UK bee, wasp and hoverfly species, covering both sampling design and bioinformatic pipelines. This month's speakers are Professor Ian Barnes, Inez Januszczak and Dr. Yacine Ben Chehida.
Monday, October 26th 2026 - 12:00 CET
Abstract
Talk 1: Using museum specimens to understand recent population history in the moss carder bee (Bombus muscorum)
Talk 2: The Poll-A-Gen project; sampling Britain’s pollinators for population genomics research
Insect pollinators are believed to be in decline across the UK, but we have little genetic baseline information against which to measure how far these declines have eroded their resilience to future change. In the first talk, we present whole-genome data from 101 museum specimens of the moss carder bumblebee (Bombus muscorum), collected between 1894 and 2019. These show that the species’ genetic diversity has fallen by about a quarter over the past century, and they also reveal that many historical specimens had been misidentified. We then introduce Poll-A-Gen, a NERC-funded project that is scaling this approach up to 16 bee, wasp and hoverfly species from the United Kingdom by pairing historical museum specimens with new material collected by recorders across the country. The second talk covers how this modern and historical sampling was designed and carried out, and the third covers the bioinformatic pipelines used to produce comparable genomic data from degraded and fresh samples.
Speakers
Professor Ian Barnes
Merit Researcher, Science Group, Natural History Museum, UK.
Professor Ian Barnes is a molecular evolutionary biologist who uses ancient DNA to understand how organisms respond to environmental change. He trained in archaeological science and molecular ecology, and held research posts at UCL and Oxford before taking up a faculty post at Royal Holloway. Having worked extensively on studies of Ice Age megafauna, such as woolly mammoths and sabretooth cats, as well as the extinct mammal fauna of the Caribbean, Barnes moved to the NHM in 2013. Subsequent work includes conducting genomic research on Britain’s ancient populations, including Cheddar Man. More recently, he has been working on reference genome generation as part of the Darwin Tree of Life project, and focusing his ancient DNA interests on historical entomological material, in particular insect pollinators.
Inez Januszczak
Project Coordinator, Science Group, Natural History Museum, UK.
Inez Januszczak is a Biologist and Project Manager specializing in coordinating sample acquisition and genomic data generation for both modern and historical material, working across a wide range of eukaryotic species—including terrestrial and marine invertebrates, mammals, birds, reptiles, bryophytes, and algae. Since 2021, she has been based at the Natural History Museum, where she is the Project Coordinator for the Darwin Tree of Life Project and the Poll-A-Gen project. With a background in animal pathology and epidemiology, her experience spans over 10 years working with global institutions, including the Zoological Society of London and the Oceanogràfic Aquarium in Valencia. Inez holds a degree in Biological Sciences from the University of Oxford and a Master’s in Wild Animal Biology from the Royal Veterinary College.
Dr Yacine Ben Chehida
Bioinformatician, Science Group, Natural History Museum, UK.
Yacine Ben Chehida is an evolutionary biologist and bioinformatician specializing in
population genomics and the analysis of modern and historical DNA. His research explores the genomic basis of adaptation and speciation across a range of species, including insects and marine mammals. He is currently based at the Natural History Museum, where he works as the bioinformatician for the Poll-A-Gen project, contributing to the sequencing and genomic analysis of Britain’s pollinators. With a background in evolutionary genomics, his current work involves applying and developing computational approaches to compare the genome of museum and modern samples to investigate how their genetic variation changed over time.
