🌊 Exciting news! I am deligthed to share with you our new publication in Marine Micropaleontology:
“Progress, challenges and future directions in marine organic-walled dinoflagellate cyst research: New insights from an international workshop”
📖 You can read and share the article here (open access): https://lnkd.in/dWy-vqah
This paper brings together the discussions of the International Workshop on Dinoflagellate Cysts, which I organised last year in Vigo (Spain). Around 30 experts from around the world joined forces to reflect on where we stand in this fascinating field and where we should head next.
🔬 Why does this matter?
Dinoflagellate cysts—resistant life stages of marine plankton—are much more than microscopic curiosities. They:
✅ Help us understand and forecast harmful algal blooms (HABs), which affect ecosystems, fisheries, aquaculture, and human health.
✅ Serve as natural archives of past oceans, letting us reconstruct climate and environmental change from sediments.
✅ Provide clues to the evolutionary history of life, linking biology and geology in unique ways.
🚀 Our review identifies key priorities for the future:
–Connecting living plankton with their cysts using molecular tools in combination tothe conventional morphological analyses.
–Expanding global datasets on cyst distributions and ecology to improve climate and ocean reconstructions.
–Developing standardized methods so research worldwide becomes more comparable.
–Exploring cutting-edge techniques (multi-omics, spectroscopy, palaeogenomics) to unlock new insights.
🙏 🙏 I’m deeply grateful to all the colleagues who contributed and to everyone who participated in making this workshop such a success. A special thanks to the Centro de Investigación Mariña (CIM) and the University of Vigo for supporting the workshop organization and covering the open-access publication charges.
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