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  • June 26, 2024

The BIOcean5D Handbook of Protocols

A BIOcean5D project deliverable: the suite of technologies and protocols we use to measure and understand life in, above and beneath the waves, down to the seafloor.
Credit: Alexis Gilli - Fondation Tara Océan

Through BIOcean5D, we hope to understand how marine life changes across 5 dimensions: 3-dimensional space, time, and human impact. Central to achieving our goals is a one-of-a-kind set of samples and data, collected from across Europe’s coastline and land-sea interface.

Collecting these samples is a mammoth task, coordinated with the TREC expedition – a cooperation between EMBL, the Tara Ocean Foundation, the EMBRC and 90+ partners. 

We’re pleased to share our first deliverable from work package 1 and 2: The BIOcean5D Handbook of Sampling and Protocols. In it, we detail all the sampling strategies and protocols, and the standards and best practices we use to collect, process and store the marine samples within our project. 

This handbook combines the expertise of the Tara Ocean Foundation and EMBL and is one of the most complete guides to sampling marine coastal ecosystems – across taxonomy and biological organisation, with state-of-the-art protocols for metagenomics, metabarcoding, metatranscriptomics, metaproteomics, metabolomics, chemical profiling and environmental sensing, as well as eDNA and bioacoustics analysis.

Find the handbook here
Find out more about our other deliverables here

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The BIOcean5D Handbook of Protocols

This website is co-funded by the European Union (GA#101059915). Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.

This work is supported by the UK government Horizon Europe Guarantee, UKRI Grant Reference Number 10039266.

This work has received funding from the Swiss State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation (SERl) under contract #22.00255.

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