LEMAR (Laboratoire des sciences de l’environnement marin) Plouzané – UMR 6539 – CNRS/UBO/IRD/IFREMER
The scientific objective of LEMAR (Marine Environmental Sciences Laboratory) focuses on understanding the mechanisms that regulate the functioning of marine ecosystems and their response to the multiple facets of global change. The LEMAR brings together biologists, chemists and physicists in order to understand and model marine systems within the biosphere, define the characteristics of the environment and organisms, and specify their interactions. A strong multidisciplinary approach is necessary to address a complex area such as interactions between the various components of the marine field: as the unit the LEMAR clearly displays a interdisciplinary policy based on strong disciplinary skills, is implemented in everyday scientific life of the unit.
The laboratory is structured into three teams:
Team 1, "Responses of organisms to global change: an integrative approach" , develops an integrated approach ranging from genes to individual. The scientific objective is to understand the individual adaptive responses in terms of life history traits (or more broadly quantitative biological traits) and integrate their consequences to the population level, the ultimate goal is to predict the evolution of these traits in a changing environment.
Team 2 " biotic interactions and environmental variability,". The main objective is to better understand the trophic interactions and interactions between species , taking into account environmental variability .
Team 3 "Integrated study of ecosystem functioning.", is clearly positioned in the ecosystem levels. Its general objective is to better understand how they work and the responses of ecosystems to global change.
Researchers associated with the project ACCUTOX mainly belong to the team 1 and 2 that aims to better understand trophic and species interactions, taking into account environmental variability. Researchers involved in ACCUTOX are particularly specialized in cellular responses upon environmental variability (biotic and abiotic). They account for more than 30 publications in this theme and have accumulated more than ten years experience on developing tools to evaluate morpho-functional parameters of bivalve hemocytes by flow cytometry. In addition, several researchers (team 1 and 2) from LEMAR also have experience in microarray screening for several years and in modeling, using the DEB-based model to assess growth rates of bivalve populations.
The LEMAR began 10 years ago to assess the impacts of toxic algae on the biology of bivalves and on the functioning of ecosystems. This work has already been finalized by several recent publications (25).