Nesomic

Nesomic gives scientific support to decision making for the conservation of biodiversity. It is a web platform where research teams bring molecular data and geographic data together – DNA sequences, alignments, phylogenetic trees and genomes, alongside map layers and geographic regions – and turn them into evidence that conservation managers can use.

Where it comes from

Nesomic was born in the NEXTGENDEM project, devoted to the endemic terrestrial plant diversity of Macaronesia (Canary Islands, Madeira, Azores and Cape Verde): knowing the genetic and phylogenetic diversity of the endemic flora, and where it is, to decide what to protect and how. The platform itself is general: it serves any group of organisms and any territory where conservation decisions need a scientific basis.

What it is for

• Answer conservation questions with data: which areas hold more phylogenetic diversity, how communities differ between places.
• Organise data in projects shared with your team, with permissions for each kind of data.
• Import and manage sequences, multiple sequence alignments, phylogenetic trees, genomes and BLAST databases, with their taxonomy and annotations.
• Work with vector and raster geographic layers and view them on maps.
• Run analyses such as sequence alignment (MAFFT, MUSCLE, ClustalW), BLAST searches, phylogenetic inference (BEAST) and phylogenetic diversity (PDA, Picante, beta diversity) on HPC clusters or cloud compute, and keep a record of every run.
• Build figures from the results: trees, alignments, maps, genome views, composite figures and stories.
• Continue the work in Jupyter notebooks, in QGIS with the Nesomic Connect plugin, or from Python with the ngd-biond client library.
• Publish a project with a DOI through Zenodo.

Who is behind it

Nesomic is developed by the Jardín Botánico Canario "Viera y Clavijo" – Unidad Asociada al CSIC, the Instituto Tecnológico de Canarias (ITC) and Gesplan. It has been funded by the NEXTGENDEM project (Interreg MAC 2014–2020) and by a commission of the Cabildo de Gran Canaria. The platform was previously known as the NEXTGENDEM platform.