Capturing biodiversity: linking a cyanobacteria culture collection to the "scratchpads" virtual research environment enhances biodiversity knowledge.

Spyros Gkelis,Manthos Panou

doi:10.3897/bdj.4.e7965

Abstract

BackgroundCurrently, cyanobacterial diversity is examined using a polyphasic approach by assessing morphological and molecular data (Komárek 2015). However, the comparison of morphological and genetic data is sometimes hindered by the lack of cultures of several cyanobacterial morphospecies and inadequate morphological data of sequenced strains (Rajaniemi et al. 2005). Furthermore, in order to evaluate the phenotypic plasticity within defined taxa, the variability observed in cultures has to be compared to the range in natural variation (Komárek and Mareš 2012). Thus, new tools are needed to aggregate, link and process data in a meaningful way, in order to properly study and understand cyanodiversity.New informationAn online database on cyanobacteria has been created, namely the Cyanobacteria culture collection (CCC) (http://cyanobacteria.myspecies.info/) using as case studies cyanobacterial strains isolated from lakes of Greece, which are part of the AUTH culture collection (School of Biology, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki). The database hosts, for the first time, information and data such as morphology/morphometry, biogeography, phylogeny, microphotographs, distribution maps, toxicology and biochemical traits of the strains. All this data are structured managed, and presented online and are publicly accessible with a recently developed tool, namely “Scratchpads”, a taxon-centric virtual research environment allowing browsing the taxonomic classification and retrieving various kinds of relevant information for each taxon.

Highlights

Biodiversity is the study of the variety of life at all possible levels of the biological organisation and scales of observation.studies of biodiversity are predicated on the capacity to bring together information from across a diverse spectrum of scientific fields (Koureas et al 2016)
Cyanobacteria are a prolific source of natural products, known from just a handful of genera (Dittmann et al 2015) and emerging data are providing a genetic basis to the natural product diversity
The comparison of morphological and genetic data is sometimes hindered by the lack of cultures of several cyanobacterial morphospecies and inadequate morphological data of sequenced strains (Rajaniemi et al 2005)

Summary

Background

Cyanobacterial diversity is examined using a polyphasic approach by assessing morphological and molecular data (Komárek 2015). The database hosts, for the first time, information and data such as morphology/morphometry, biogeography, phylogeny, microphotographs, distribution maps, toxicology and biochemical traits of the strains. All this data are structured managed, and presented online and are publicly accessible with a recently developed tool, namely “Scratchpads”, a taxon-centric virtual research environment allowing browsing the taxonomic classification and retrieving various kinds of relevant information for each taxon.

Introduction

Sampling methods