Morlon Lab

Research focus

ERC Advanced Grant · 2024

Diversification of the Eukaryotic Plankton in the Sunlit Ocean

Oceanic plankton constitute a diverse array of organisms crucial to Earth’s carbon cycle, climate regulation, and the functioning of the ecosystems. A key biological challenge lies in understanding the build-up of planktonic diversity in the global oceans. Two primary limitations are the scarcity of robust (phylo)genetic data for most plankton groups, and the lack of computational tools designed to explore diversification in the ocean, continually shaped by currents. Here, I propose to characterize the patterns and drivers of diversification across present-day eukaryote plankton groups by harnessing three main resources: i) recent global-scale surveys of oceanic samples, ii) emerging…

From the public funding record at EU CORDIS. Describes the funded project, not the reviews below.