MERG - Universitetet i Oslo

MERG
Biodiversity of marine eukaryotes (BioMarKs)
Objectives of the project
• Establish a baseline of protist biodiversity in EU coastal waters,
• Measure biodiversity change in marine protist communities facing ocean acidification,
• Evaluate the impact of ballast water and pollution on marine protist biodiversity.
• To significantly enhancing our basic knowledge of eukaryote biodiversity and ecology (Who?
How Many? When? Where? Why?),
Project summary
MERG and other research groups at University of Oslo participate in the BioMarKs project as one of 8
EU research institutes. More than 30 experts from various biological disciplines, economy and politics
are brought together to address key questions about eukaryote microbial diversity.
BioMarKs integrates expertise in eukaryotic microbial taxonomy and evolution, marine biology and
ecology, genomics and molecular biology, bioinformatics, as well as marine economy and policy, to
assess the taxonomic depth, environmental significance, human health and economical implications of
biodiversity of the unicellular eukaryotes or protists. Exploration of ribosomal rDNA clone libraries over
the last decade has revealed ever-increasing biodiversity in both novel lineages and groups which were
believed to be species-poor. BioMarKs will reassess coastal marine protist biodiversity using massive
454 amplicon sequencing of both rDNA and reverse transcribed rRNA general eukaryote and groupspecific
markers, in order to analyze both diversity and abundance/activity of marine protists at
different taxonomic levels. A suite of physical, chemical, and biological metadata from the same
samples will allow statistical analyses of the ecological forces shaping marine protist biodiversity.
Microscopy analyses, as well as downstream PCR-based and FISH molecular analyses of archive DNA,
RNA, and cellular material (again from the same samples) will allow anchoring of the genetic data into
high quality phenotypic, phylogenetic, and ecological quantitative frameworks.
MERG participate in particular on topics related to parasitic organisms and development of
suitable bioinformatics tools for investigation of diversity and abundance of parasitic groups.
The team at UiO:
Wenche Eikrem, Kamran Shalchian-Tabrizi, Tom Andersen, Kjell Bjørklund, Bente Edvardsen.
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The project has a project
webpage. BioMarKs