Final Activity Report Summary - ESUMAST (Ecological significance of uncultured marine stramenopiles)
The ESUMAST project focused on uncultured flagellates named MAST for Marine Stramenopiles, which are well represented in natural environments. The first objective of this project aimed to assess the trophic relationships which exist between different MAST flagellates and the other components of the microbial food web, such as bacteria or photosynthetic picoplankton. We demonstrated the existence of different feeding behaviours, such as size selection and/or prey preferences, among the MAST groups.
The second and main objective of the project was to obtain these organisms in culture so that we can carry out physiological and genomic studies, which stands nowadays as one of the primary goals in marine microbial ecology. By designing original isolation experiments we achieved to culture not only a representative of a MAST group but a variety of other heterotrophic flagellates, all belonging to uncultured taxa. The achievement of cultures for a range of these eukaryotic microbes opens up new perspectives and has major implications for scientific fields related to genomics, microbial ecology, biological oceanography, and macro-evolution of eukaryotes.