Diversité et impact des virus dans les systèmes de production inventive de microalgues

Project Acronym: PHYCOVIR

Topics: Microorganisms, Algae Culture, Maritime Environment, Sanitary Control

Disciplinary Fields: Marine Biology, Virology

Summary: Photosynthetic microorganisms in the ocean form the basis of the marine food chain and are responsible for more than half of primary production on Earth. The diversity of microalgae inhabiting phytoplankton, their abundance and dynamics are partly regulated by viruses. Viruses play a major role in global biogeochemical cycles. These viruses also represent a potential threat to industrial microalgal culture systems that reach critical densities favourable to the outbreak of epidemics. Cases of mass mortality (i.e., crash) of cultured microalgae have been documented on some American pilot sites, causing up to 30% losses in annual harvests1. However, the causes of these crashes are rarely exploited.

PHYCOVIR is a project to explore viral biodiversity and assess the impact of viruses in an intensive microalgae culture system implemented for biofuel production and recycling of industrial smoke. Three lines of work are proposed:
1) Metagenomic analysis of the virome of the culture basin to study viral diversity.
2) Isolation of virus strains from the culture basin for laboratory characterization
3) Analysis of algal/virus population dynamics by quantitative PCR to characterize the reciprocal influence of these two compartments.

Project Interlocutor: Guillaume Blanc (MIO, UMR 7294)

Project Duration: 04/29/2019 – 04/28/2021

Call of Proposal: Pépinière d’Excellence 2018

Photography Credits: Photo by Adrien Converse on Unsplash

  1. Congress of the International Society of Applied Phycology, Nantes 2017 []

Vous aimerez aussi...

Laisser un commentaire

Votre adresse e-mail ne sera pas publiée. Les champs obligatoires sont indiqués avec *

Ce site utilise Akismet pour réduire les indésirables. En savoir plus sur comment les données de vos commentaires sont utilisées.

Rechercher dans OpenEdition Search

Vous allez être redirigé vers OpenEdition Search