Culture laboratory

Our culturing labs and equipment allow us to carry out manipulative experiments and obtain enrichment cultures of benthic foraminifera and dinoflagellates. Continuous cultures of benthic foraminifera and dinoflagellates are kept under controlled conditions (temperature, salinity, pH and light) in incubators (Room 1770). All sensors used in maintaining the cultures are regurlarly intercalibrated to ensure constant culture conditions. Manipulative experiments can be carried out using a setup with six incubators, fully programmable to simulate any kind of temperature and illumination cycles. Alternatively, a setup with up to twelve 40 L aquaria can be used simultaniously for an experiment (Room 1660). Each aquarium can simulate water movement and is equipped with individual temperature control. Light conditions are programmable for sets of several aquaria.

Our culturing facilities allow us to investigate how foraminifera and dinoflagellates react to environmental stress, what their optimal growth conditions are, how they change during their ontogeny and ultimately how they store paleoenvironmental information in the biominerals they produce.

A full list of the species in culture at our laboratories can be found here.

Main equipment:
Incubators, Imaging PAM fluorometer (WALZ M-Series MAXI), PAR light meter (Apogee), Micro-respiration measurement chambers (Unisense), Salinity and pH probes (WTW), Microplate spectrophotometer for pigment measurements (Epoch, Biotek), Sediment oxygen microsensor with micromanipulator (Unisense)