Algae on the agenda at SAMS

摘要

THE Dunstaffnage Marine Laboratory of the Scottish Association for Marine Science (SAMS) attracted around 100 delegates from around the world for three algal-related meetings that were held back-to-back in Oban from 2 to 11 June. The series kicked offwith a two-day workshop of the genome annotation consortium of the first fully sequenced seaweed, Ectocarpus siliculosus. This is an important marine fouling organism, distributed world-wide in temperate and cold seas. It lives on many man-made structures in the sea, including fish farms, ship hulls and piers. Led by French scientists from the Roscoff marine laboratory, the genetic material of this filamentous brown alga was sequenced in a three-year effort. An international consortium of scientists has been working over the last year to decipher the vast amount of data, looking both for genes known from other organisms and for those which make Ectocarpus special.