Баркодинг микроводорослей - первый этап масштабного изучения биоразнообразия и мониторинга карьеров

According to the decision of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity of 1992 the main tasks of the society are the conservation and sustainable use of biological diversity because of its intrinsic value. The way to implement these tasks is to utilize the global international program «Barcode of Life Initiative». A DNA barcode is a new instrument for the correlation of a taxonomically undetermined individual to a taxon with similar genetic sequence in a given reference database and for the biodiversity analysis of environmental samples.

The algae and the cyanobacteria are the important part of most biological communities – benthic and planktonic, marine and freshwater, terrestrial and aerial ecosystems. A large percent of algae in global biodiversity allows us to use them as bioindicators in water and soil quality assessments, and also in ecological studies. Therefore, the unambiguous species identification of the microalgae is the decisive point for the quality of this research.

This project application includes algae inventory of insufficiently explored quarry Gurovo by means of the DNA barcode to create species and genetic biodiversity database of algae and cyanobacteria, and also search of new and endemic taxa, paramount strains for biotechnology and potential bioindicators to assess the state of technologically disturbed lands.