Olga Flegontova získala cenu děkana

"Diversity and biogeography of diplonemid and kinetoplastid protists in global marine plankton"

Annotation

The PhD thesis is composed of three published papers, one manuscript submitted for publication and one manuscript in preparation. The main research goal was investigating the diversity of marine planktonic protists using the metabrcoding approach. The worldwide dataset of the Tara Oceans project including small subunit ribosomal DNA metabarcodes (the V9 region) was used. The first paper investigated general patterns of protist abundance and diversity in a global set of samples from the photic zone of the ocean. Diplonemids, a subgroup of Euglenozoa, emerged as one of the most diverse lineages. The second paper was a mini-review highlighting this unexpected result on diplonemids. The third paper provided a detailed characteristic of the diversity, abundance and community structure of diplonemids and revealed them as the most species-rich eukaryotic clade in the plankton. The submitted manuscript was focused on the same topics related to planktonic kinetoplastids, the sistergroup of diplonemids. The manuscript in preparation will describe the creation of a curated reference database of excavate 18S rDNA sequences, including those of diplonemids and kinetoplastids, that will be indispensable for analyses of environmental high-throughput metabarcoding data. Our studies provide essentially the first global survey for diplonemid and kinetoplastids protists, which were overlooked previously in marine biodiversity and ecology studies.