Speaker
Description
Diversity of microscopic biological particles plays a crucial role in important ecosystem services, e.g. water quality (phytoplankton), air quality or pollination (pollen). Many human-driven activities like climate change, eutrophication or invasive species are expected to massively change the composition of these particles. Monitoring of these tiny particles is therefore an essential task in order to detect diversity changes, issue short-term warnings, generally understand and estimate consequences for ecosystems and society, to communicate these observations in a timely way and to support and derive suitable actions. Most monitoring tasks for air and water quality as well as plant-pollinator monitoring are currently performed via microscopic counting which strongly limits sampling capacity and frequency and, as a consequence restricts monitoring to either low spatial and temporal resolutions or non-quantitative assessments of biomass and physiological activity. The iDiv support unit called “iCyt” (“integrative Cytomics”) allows to measure individual cells and particles in suspension independent of their origin (water, soil or air samples of plant, animal or human origin). Our unique cutting-edge high-throughput (imaging) flow cytometry measurement capabilities of individual particles in powerful combination with deep-learning algorithms represent a transformative advance for environmental monitoring. At the same time, the method also enables estimation of particulate biomass, physiological activity or ploidy. We are there to support researchers at iDiv and affiliated institutes with their research questions and needs.
| Status Group | Senior Scientist |
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