Abstract
The Eastern Channel is an ideal workshop site to work on understanding marine diversity, the environmental context being both relatively complex and quite well documented via several classic observation projects. The functioning of the communities’ succession is however not yet sufficiently understood, and our knowledge on genetic diversity remains almost non-existent. Current molecular and genomic tools appear crucial to analyse and understand the structure of marine and terrestrial ecosystems. This project is an interdisciplinary integration study of the genetic, genomic and ecological aspects of planktonic micro-eukaryots, which will provide new information on some key organisms at the basis of the marine food web. Our project’s aims are: (i) the establishment of an assessment of the diversity of planktonic species in the Eastern Channel. This data will be accessible on public data bases and will be able to be used as future reference in a global change context (climate change, pollution, overexploitation of resources), (ii) the optimisation of a molecular investigation tool on the diversity of species in environmental samples; more specifically, it will contribute to the improvement of sequencing methods, which are powerful and fast tools that allow for the low-cost identification of planktonic organisms including parasitic and potentially toxic species; (iii) the realisation of the decoding of the microbial community’s metabolic potential via the identification of the genes present.
France