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Laboratoire MAPIEM (UR 4323)

Matériaux Polymères Interfaces Environnement Marin

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Microbial & Chemical Ecology of marine Biofilms (MCEB)

Head: Jean-François BRIAND

Marine immersed surfaces are colonized by highly diversified biofilms, embedded in a polymeric matrix, with various effects. Studying species-specific microbial communities on seaweeds allows to build host-microbiome relationships in the holobiont context. On another side, studying the colonization of artificial facilities (ship’s hull, aquaculture nets, pipelines …), which threatens their integrity and/or leads to considerable economic losses, allows to decipher surface-microbiome relationships.

Our objective is to determine and unravel the drivers of the colonization of surfaces by marine biofilms. Together, impact of the nature of the surfaces (artificial or natural), their properties (surface energy, roughness, chemical composition...), conditions of immersion (static vs. dynamic) and environmental parameters (temperature, salinity, nutrients, pollutants...) will be investigated.

The approach we develop is based on an original and multidisciplinary characterization of these natural biofilms to study in parallel:

  • the structure and dynamics of microbial communities (flow cytometry, microscopy, molecular approaches),
  • the extracellular polymeric substances (EPS) which constitute the biofilm matrix (labelling, chromatography and spectroscopy techniques),
  • their chemical composition (eg. taxonomic biomarkers, stress and communication compounds…) by environmental metabolomics (LC-MS, GC-MS).

In-situ approaches will be associated to in vitro ones, especially to study (i) metabolic and EPS production of model bacterial strains in response to various factors (type of surface, biocides...) or (ii) antifouling properties of natural compounds as well as original coatings developed in our lab.

As biofilm-macrofouling relationships are of primary importance in the understanding of the biofouling process and in antifouling performances, we intend to identify relevant links between biofilm properties, revealed through the approaches described above, and the recruitment of eukaryotic multicellular organisms (eg. barnacle larvae, spores of algae...).

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Microbial & Chemical Ecology of marine Biofilms (MCEB)

  Contact(s)

Head: Jean-François BRIAND

Phone: +33(0)4.94.14.67.60 or 23.76
E-mail: jean-francois.briand@univ-tln.fr