Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) - Station Biologique de Roscoff
CNRS, the French national Centre for Scientific Research, is a public research organisation. One CNRS unit from the Station Biologique de Roscoff will be involved in the project: UMR 7144, administered by the regional office Bretagne et Pays de la Loire (DR 17, Rennes). This unit is a Joint Research Unit with the Université Pierre et Marie Curie (UPMC) which CNRS will represent. Founded in 1872, the Station Biologique de Roscoff is one of the oldest marine stations in the world. With a current staff of more than 300 (permanent and temporary personnel) it is one of the leading marine research institutions in Europe participating in many large scale projects such as Assemble or EMBRC (European Marine Biological Resource Centers). SBR has a long tradition of studying marine plankton. The Plankton group has a staff of 45. In the past 20 years, it has focused the smallest size classes, the picoplankton. Its major achievements include the development of flow cytometry methods to measure distribution of picophytoplankton, bacteria and viruses at sea, the application of molecular approaches to characterize picoeukaryote diversity and a pioneering role in genomics of marine cyanobacteria. Recently it broadened its research scope to large plankton, such as radiolarians, and to viruses. The Plankton Group is managing the Roscoff Culture Collection (RCC) founded in 1998, that has become one of the largest international collections of marine microalgae and phototrophic bacteria holding at present more than 2,000 strains from a very wide range of environments from the tropics to the poles. The SBR has all facilities necessary to isolate, maintain and characterize marine microbial cultures.
Contact person: Christian Jeanthon ( christian.jeanthon@sb-roscoff.fr )
Website: www.sb-roscoff.fr
Role of CNRS in MaCuMBA:
CNRS SBR will coordinate WP4 that is dedicated to culture collection and preservation. The RCC will act as one of the core reference collections for the project. It will also participate in WP2 providing samples from a range of location and developing novel approaches for isolation, in WP3 improving current culture conditions for already isolated strains and in WP6 to sequence genome of isolated organisms and to develop genome comparison tools for picocyanobacteria. The RCC will also be a key element in WP9 for the dissemination of strains.
Profile of staff engaged in the project:
Daniel Vaulot is a senior scientist (DR) at CNRS and leads the Diversity of Plankton team focusing on the taxonomy, ecology and genomics small photosynthetic eukaryotes. He is also the Director of the RCC. | |
Frederik Partensky is a senior scientist at CNRS and leads the Marine Photosynthetic Prokaryotes team, specialized in genomics, ecology and physiology of marine picocyanobacteria (Synechococcus and Prochlorococcus). | |
Laure Guillou (parasites). | |
Christian Jeanthon is a senior scientist at CNRS in the Marine Photoheterotrophic Prokaryotes team. He is specialized in the ecology and diversity of marine photoheterotrophic bacteria (aerobic anoxygenic photoheterotrophs and proteorhodopsin-containing bacteria). His research interests also focus on the interactions between microalgae and bacteria. |