- news
- 18-10-2011
The laboratory of Prof Jan Pawlowski is pleased to announce the launch of foramBarcoding, an online database of modern foraminifera.
Foraminifera are a major group of protozoans that successfully colonizes aquatic and terrestrial habitats.
Foraminifera are characterized by a granular pseudopodial network called granuloreticulopodia and most of them feature a test (shell) that is composed of an organic, agglutinated or calcareous wall and has one or multiple chambers.
Some species have developed symbiotic relationships with various groups of algal protists and bacteria.
DNA barcoding refers to a technique that characterizes species using DNA fragments specific to each species.
DNA barcode sequences are very short relative to the entire genome and they can be obtained reasonably quickly and cheaply.
The identification of foraminiferal species is mainly based on the morphology of their tests, which leads to difficulties when dealing with morphologically variable species and impedes the detection of sibling species.
The foramBarcoding website proposes a complementary identification system based on DNA barcodes.
The record of each species in the database comprises its general description, photos, collection data, DNA sequences, and references to related publications.
The database is manually curated and differs from other foraminiferal databases by including only species, for which both molecular and morphological data are available.
Our objective is to provide a complete, high quality and freely accessible resource of information about modern foraminiferal species.