Contrary to what was announced, this morning the weather is good in Dinard Bay (Ille-et-Vilaine). In the distance, the walls of Saint-Malo outline the faded blue of an almost cloudless sky. The ocean shimmers and a slight swell causes the ship to list. For a moment, it seems like you’re on a cruise ship. At least if work did not begin immediately on board the trawler. Louis-Fage.
Just crossing the line of ponds, technician Jézabel Lamoureux, from the National Museum of Natural History (MNHN) station in Dinard, opens the jaws of a bucket of sediment and then launches the machine into the water. Once the box is lifted, the sample sample from the seabed is emptied into a tray placed on the deck: sea spiders, crabs, juvenile fish, mollusks, sea grasses… a variety of animals and plants, characteristic of the seaweed herbaria. It grows near the nearby Rance Dam and emerges, full of life, from a ball of sticky mud, mixed with remains of shells and algae.
The collection refers to a single individual per species, whose DNA will be collected, fragmented and sequenced into chunks, virtually assembled and annotated in its gene-encoded regions. It will feed a database that will bring together the “reference genomes” of 4,500 eukaryotic marine organisms (that is, those whose cells have a nucleus) from French waters. This program called “Atlasea” is managed by the CNRS and the Atomic Energy and Alternative Energies Commission (CEA).
DIVE-Sea campaigns dedicated to taking samples on the coast, in the high seas or at depth, remain under the responsibility of the Museum. The first of them mobilized, from June 24 to July 7, eighty people on a coastal strip that goes from the port of Cancale (Ille-et-Vilaine) to Cap Fréhel (Côtes-d’Armor). Among the active forces deployed: Dinard station personnel, the crew of the Louis-Fagebut also divers, fishermen, taxonomists and a whole series of marine biologists, bioinformaticians, geneticists, etc.
Set of spaces
“The great atlas of living genomes has not yet been created”explains Hugues Roest Crollius, director of research at the CNRS and co-pilot of the Atlasea, while the “low” Loïc Le Goff positions the ship for a new “dumpster hit”. Indeed, after decades of a colossal effort that mobilized laboratories around the world and cost 3,000 million dollars (about 2,700 million euros), biologists have managed to decipher almost the entire sequence of 3,100 million bases or nucleotides (the letters A, T, C, G) that carries human DNA. And this from the central part of its twenty-three pairs of chromosomes (or centromeres) to their most extreme ends (or telomeres).
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