Picture taken by Marie-Laure Guillemin

In Brief

My long-lasting aim is to expand existing knowledge in the biodiversity of marine ecosystems, their evolutionary histories and biogeographic patterns. To date I have addressed these interests through molecular ecology, focused on benthic diversity of coral reefs, and the study of host – microbe interactions in host divergence.

During my masters I studied the bacterial community that coexists with the algae holobiont Gracilaria chilensis. In this context, I sought to understand the effects of domestication in this microbiota in terms of richness, composition and structure. At the same time, diving on the functional potential of this microbial community looking at their metabolic capacities.

Previously, I have worked applying eDNA techniques to study the OTUs composition of coral reefs at the Tropical Eastern Pacific (TEP) of Panama and Costa Rica, looking at coral, sponge and elasmobranch diversities in coral reefs and mangroves ecosystems.

In this web-page I hope to share little glances of the data gathered during my first years of experience in research, that is being prepared for near-future publication.

Hi Curious Visitor

Picture facilitated by Matthieu Leray

eDNA

Living beings liberate traces of their genetic material to their surrounding environment every day. Environmental DNA techniques consists in high-throughput sequencing of an environmental sample for multitaxa identification using total and typically degraded DNA, liberated in the environment (Taberlet et al. 2012). When complemented with sequencing of specific marker genes the study of specific eurakyotic taxa is allowed.

This techniques present different advantages (Adams et al. 2019), as:

Less invasive for monitoring diversity.
Less sampling logistics costs.
Helpfull for studying cryptic and highly endangered species.

Here we use seawater samples coupled with ITS2 (Brian et al. 2019, Alexander et al. 2020) and 12S (Miya et al. 2015) marker genes to investigate the coral, sponges and elasmobranch diversity that could be found through the lens of seawater from Panama and Costa Rica TEP reefs and estuaries.

Data gathered showed clear biogeographical patterns and significant differences in the species richness between sites and seasons for the coral reefs (corals and sponges) and mangroves (elasmobranch diversity) in the Panama and Costa Rica TEP.