With 31 days to go before departure, the BioSWOT-Med campaign team has installed the flow cytometer on the R/V Atalante. It will be one of two instruments of this type used during the campaign.
With 31 days to go before its own departure, scheduled for 20/04/2023, Morgane Didry and Gérald Grégori from the BioSWOT-Med campaign team have installed an automated flow cytometer on the R/V l'Atalante, at the ship's home port of La-Seyne-sur-Mer. The flow cytometer will be used by the SWEM-SWOT 2023 campaign team, which will run from 20/03 to 18/04/2023 in the western Mediterranean.
During the BioSWOT-Med campaign, two types of flow cytometers will be used. The one shown in the photo is called "Cytopro" (Cytobuoy b.v.) and the other "Cytoflex" (Beckman Coulter). They complement each other to distinguish and study the different components of plankton communities (phytoplankton, bacterioplankton, viruses).
Flow cytometry is a technology developed in the 1970s to count blood cells. It is now widely used in biological oceanography to count planktonic cells, which can be automatically detected and distinguished according to their specific optical characteristics (based on light scattering and fluorescence emission).
In a future post, Morgane Dridy (engineer at MIO) will tell us all about flow cytometry: how it works and how it can be used to distinguish between plankton cells!
For the moment, we'll leave you with an image showing the emergence of a sample of seawater near the port of La-Seyne-sur-Mer: how many groups of plankton can you count?
BioSWOT-Med blog
