Use case title (contact person)
Eukaryotic Microbial Plankton in the Western Levantine Basin (Eastern Mediterranean Sea) (Dr. Ioulia Santi, IO, HCMR)
In-brief: description the analysis that was carried out
18S metabarcoding analysis was performed to access the diversity, composition and distribution of microbial eukaryotic plankton in the open sea.
In brief: description of the pertinent project
Even though plankton microbial eukaryotes are important members of the water column ecosystem, investigations of natural protist communities have regional gaps and suffer from poor community characterization. This study combined 18S rRNA gene metabarcoding, biomass measurements and statistical analyses of multiple environmental variables to examine the distribution of plankton eukaryotes at different sites and water layers in an oligotrophic area (Western Levantine Basin, Eastern Mediterranean).
Comments on how the cluster supported this work
The were about 2.5 million raw sequence reads, from 40 samples. A series of bioinformatic tools were used, such as AmpliconNoise, OBITools and SWARM v2 algorithm.
Relevant publication if available
Submitted work: Santi I, Kasapidis P, Psarra S, Assimakopoulou G, Pavlidou A, Protopapa M, Tsiola A, Zeri C, Pitta P (2019): Bathymetric Distribution of Eukaryotic Microbial Plankton Controlled by Environmental Variables.
