Section: New Results

NGS for biodiversity

In collaboration with the Laboratoire d'Écologie Alpine (LECA) at Grenoble where there is a strong expertise on DNA meta-barcoding, we had devised several tools for barcode design and analysis. EcoPrimers thus identified new barcode markers and their associated PCR primers within a DNA meta-barcoding approach. The algorithm was optimised two quality indexes measuring taxonomical range and discrimination to select the most efficient markers from a set of reference sequences, according to some experimental constraints such as marker length or specifically targeted taxa. We had also devised assembler algorithms directed to organelles (mitochondria or chloroplasts). This year, in collaboration with the Inria project-team MISTIS, we developed a statistical modelling approach to investigate the spatial cross-correlations between different taxa identified by meta-barcoding of soil sample from French Guiana (this was selected as a conference paper at the “45ème Journées de Statistiques” 2013 that took place at Toulouse and is organised by the Société Française de Statistique . This approach allows to visualise the co-occurrence pattern as a “species interaction graph”, and to study the mutual exclusion (competition) or inclusion (symbiosis) of different plant species.