Deep mobilization of natural history collections of microscopic organisms using high throughput image analyses and interlinking with molecular data (MobiDiC - MOBIlization of a DIatom Collection)

硅藻是具有硅壳(锥体)的微小藻类，在全球初级生产力、碳和硅的生物地球化学循环中发挥着重要作用，并在生物水质监测和古环境重建中得到广泛应用。这些生物的分类收集没有在很大程度上数字化，因为一张显微镜幻灯片上通常有代表数十个分类群的数千个标本，通常只有一到几个选定的标本通过人工显微照相和/或分类标记来记录。我们建议使用显微幻灯片扫描，然后使用计算机辅助分类索引，以大幅增加可用于收藏挖掘和基于收藏的研究的信息量。此外，我们将探索硅藻分析的替代方法的潜力，即基于活细胞形态的鉴定和分子条形码，以实现基于收集的信息和现场之间更好的联系。

Diatoms are microscopic algae with silica shells (frustules), playing an important role in global primary production, the biogeochemical cycles of carbon and silicon, and being extensively applied in biological water quality monitoring and paleo-environmental reconstructions. Taxonomic collections of these organisms are not digitized at a substantial depth because of the thousands of specimens representing dozens of taxa usually present on a single microscopic slide, only one to a handful of selected specimens are usually documented by manual microscopic photography and/or taxonomic labelling. We propose to use microscopic slide scanning, followed by computer assisted taxonomic indexing, to substantially increase the amount of information that can be made available for collection mining and collection-based research. In addition, we will explore the potential of alternative approaches for diatom analyses, namely, live cell morphology based identification and molecular barcoding to achieve an improved linkage between collection-based information and field.