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Contenuto archiviato il 2024-04-30

Toxin Production in Cyanobacteria

Obiettivo



In many lakes and rivers toxic cyanobacteria are found. This causes severe problems for recreation and drinking water production. The toxicity of cyanobacteria is found to be highly vanable. Toxic blooms can change ftom toxic to non-toxic and vise versa. It is not clear how far this is caused by a succession of toxic and non-toxic strains within one species or, by the changes in toxicity of one population. Morphological analyses and physiological knowledge cannot give a solution here. Little is known of the relation of this toxin with the food-web in fresh waters. Is this toxin produced to prevent grazing, what is the distribution of this toxin in the food-web. In the synthesis of Microcystin the toxin produced by the cyanobacterium Microcystis the enzyme microcystin-synthetase plays a crucial role. Recently two institutes of this network have sequenced the genes if this enzyme. With this information it becomes possible to produce probes and construct-strains which are extremely important tools for physiological and ecological research concerning toxin production in continuous cultures and in natural systems. In this mul- tidisciplinary research programme molecular biological tools will be developed and used to unravel the condi- tions under which this toxin is produced and what its influence is on thefood-web of the natural systems.
A network-programme has been developed to train young post-docs to incorporate molecular biological, physiological and ecological theories and techniques to study one problem: toxin production in cyanobacteria. - The programme contains training on the job, short training couses, working visits, and an 8 week workshop.
Important topics are:
- The production of DNA-probes and reporter strains to be used in physiology and ecology to recognize toxin production in laboratory and field populations.
- Toxin production will carefully compared with ecological relevant conditions in laboratory and field systems.
- In an eight-week field traing-course the whole team of the network is training to use all information and molecular tools to study the toxicity of a field population of Microcystis and to compare this with the results of the physiological and enclosure studies.
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Campo scientifico (EuroSciVoc)

Programma(i)

Argomento(i)

Invito a presentare proposte

Dati non disponibili

Meccanismo di finanziamento

NET - Research network contracts

Coordinatore

Universiteit van Amsterdam
Contributo UE
Nessun dato
Indirizzo
127,Nieuwe Achtergracht
1018 WS Amsterdam
Paesi Bassi
Costo totale
Nessun dato

Partecipanti (6)