The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

October 2, 2012

The dinoflagellate cf. Gyrodinium within a water sample collected from the Neuse RIver Estuary

Last week there were numerous harmful algal blooms in the Neuse River Estuary (NRE) associated with some extensive fish kills. Fortunate for us (but not so fortunate for the Menhaden), we sampled a bloom of the dinoflagellate cf. Gyroodinium for metatranscriptomic sequencing as part of a project to evaluate the usefulness in integrating high-throughput sequencing approaches to assess the taxonomy and molecular physiology of eukaryotic phytoplankton in the NRE.  This project is funded by the NC Sea Grant and is a collaboration between the Marchetti lab and Hans Paerl’s lab at the Institute of Marine Sciences in Morehead City.