Vladimir Mikryukov

Vladimir Mikryukov is a molecular ecologist with special interests in ecological genetics, biodiversity, and metagenomics. He is a research fellow at the Ecology of Biological Interactions Workgroup at the Institute of Ecology and Earth Sciences of the University of Tartu and a member of the Mycology and Microbiology Center (MMC, Estonia).

Vladimir’s Ph.D. research was devoted to phylogeography and population genetics of lichen symbionts. His following projects studied the principles of bacterial and fungal community assembly and the role of their diversity in forest ecosystems’ functioning and stability. As a bioinformatician and biostatistician, he has been involved in exploration of the consequences of strong long-term disturbance on the phylogenetic diversity of lichen, bird, and soil fungal communities; analysis of the spatial structure and environmental drivers of plant distribution in extreme environments; and metagenomic-based analysis of eukaryotic diversity in sphagnum bogs.

Currently, Vladimir focuses on the drivers of the global distribution of soil fungal communities and microbial functional diversity based on soil metagenome sequencing across Europe. In collaboration with the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), he is developing a pipeline for phylogenetic diversity analysis of the extensive (billion-record scale) worldwide species occurrence data.

Vladimir will be presenting his work “NextITS: a pipeline for metabarcoding fungi with full-length ITS sequenced with PacBio” and “PhyloNext: a pipeline for phylogenetic diversity analysis of GBIF-mediated data in the cloud”.