Prof. Dr. Catherine Boyen
Laboratoire de Biologie Intégrative des Modèles marins,
Station Biologique de Roscoff,
France

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Host-microbe interactions as a Driver of Brown algal acclimation to environmental changes

Abstract: Brown algae are multicellular, mainly marine organisms that live along the coastlines of all continents, where they form the dominant vegetation in the intertidal zone and constitute important primary producers. Many brown algae are strongly impacted by human activities and climate change, underlining the importance of understanding how these organisms function and interact with their environment. An important step towards understanding how brown algae acclimate to environmental changes has been the development of Ectocarpus as a genomic and genetic model for this lineage which led to a range of new approaches to study stress tolerance in this organism. Ectocarpus is a also cosmopolitan genus of small filamentous brown algae with a high capacity to acclimate to different environments and a long history of research. So far, studies of acclimation to environmental changes in algae have dealt primarily with the algae themselves, but very little is known about the reaction of the associated microbiome in response to these changes. In this talk I will focus on the impact of abiotic (here salinity) changes on the bacterial phycosphere and its potential role during the algal acclimation. I will highlight how the concept of holobiont has modified our vision of the biology of brown algae.  [PDF]