Works at – Institute of Ecosystem Study, National Research Council, Verbania Pallanza, Italy
Teaches – Advances in DNA Taxonomy (DNTX)
Diego Fontaneto is a zoologist and an ecologist interested in biological diversity in general, and in particular in how bdelloid rotifers can survive, persist and diversify in the apparent absence of sexual recombination. Given the ubiquity of bdelloids in any habitat, from freshwater to marine, to their unusual ecological characteristics of desiccation resistance, and to their ‘scandalous’ evolutionary features of being considered ancient asexuals, his work is often at the boundary between ecology and evolution. He has been exposed to the different tolls and techniques in DNA taxonomy in the last ten years as an alternative to morphological species identification due to the paucity of taxonomically reliable phenotypic features in bdelloid rotifers.
