First regional reference database of northern Adriatic diatom transcriptomes.

Marine microbial communities form the basis for the functioning of marine ecosystems and the conservation of biodiversity. With the application of metagenomics and metatranscriptomics in marine environmental studies, significant progress has been made in analysing the functioning of microbial communities as a whole. These molecular techniques are highly dependent on reliable, well-characterised, comprehensive and taxonomically diverse sequenced reference transcriptomes of microbial organisms.

A metabarcode based (species) inventory of the northern Adriatic phytoplankton.

Background: The northern Adriatic is characterised as the coldest and most productive marine area of the Mediterranean, which is due to high nutrient levels introduced by river discharges, the largest of which is the Italian Po River (at the same time also the largest freshwater input into the Mediterranean). The northern Adriatic is a very shallow marine ecosystem with ocean current patterns that result in long retention times of plankton in the area. The northern Adriatic phytoplankton biodiversity and abundance are well-studied, through many scientific and long-term monitoring reports.

Identification of the heterotrophic nanoflagellate Bilabrum latius in the southern Adriatic (Mediterranean Sea).

Heterotrophic flagellates (HF) represent an important protist group in marine ecosystem functioning. Characterised by high taxonomic diversity, identification and classification of HF is often difficult using classical methods of light microscopy (LM). Complementing LM with molecular methods, such as barcoding, enables reliable taxonomic identification of even small size nanoflagellates that share similar or unnoticeable morphological features.