Project Details
Projekt
Deep mobilization of natural history collections of microscopic organisms using high throughput image analyses and interlinking with molecular data (MobiDiC - MOBIlization of a DIatom Collection)
Subject Area
Evolution and Systematics of Plants and Fungi
Term
from 2017 to 2021
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 350992967
Diatoms are microscopic algae with silica shells (frustules), playing an important role in global primary production, the biogeochemical cycles of carbon and silicon, and being extensively applied in biological water quality monitoring and paleo-environmental reconstructions. Taxonomic collections of these organisms are not digitized at a substantial depth because of the thousands of specimens representing dozens of taxa usually present on a single microscopic slide, only one to a handful of selected specimens are usually documented by manual microscopic photography and/or taxonomic labelling. We propose to use microscopic slide scanning, followed by computer assisted taxonomic indexing, to substantially increase the amount of information that can be made available for collection mining and collection-based research. In addition, we will explore the potential of alternative approaches for diatom analyses, namely, live cell morphology based identification and molecular barcoding to achieve an improved linkage between collection-based information and field.
DFG Programme
Priority Programmes
