Team leader : Pr Cécile Lepère (cecile.lepere@uca.fr)
 

The research conducted by the MEB team falls within the field of microbial ecology, with the main objective of exploring the taxonomic and functional diversity of microbial communities (bacteria, archaea, microbial eukaryotes) as well as the drivers of their diversification through the flow of genetic material in aquatic ecosystems. This work prioritizes the use of environmental genomics tools and includes the development of bioinformatics approaches for analyzing data generated by high-throughput sequencing. The core of our research is focused on lake ecosystems, where the diversity and physiology of microorganisms are relatively little studied compared to other ecosystems. Our metabarcoding and metagenomics work is thus one of the few studies to specifically address the microbial communities of lake ecosystems.
 

Our researches are based on several axes:

  1. Deciphering microbial diversity and metabolisms in lake ecosystems
  2. Archaea and Bacteria in aquatic environments: a diversity offering numerous prospects for applications (e.g. bioenergy)
  3. From gene flows to the emergence of new mechanisms in aquatic ecosystems



 
Example of research : Diversity and potential hosts of Microsporidia in aquatic ecosystems (Chauvet et al. 2022 et 2023)