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)

硅藻是一种具有硅壳（硅藻壳）的微型藻类，在全球初级生产、碳和硅的地球化学循环中起着重要作用，在生物水质监测和古环境重建中有着广泛的应用。这些生物体的分类学收藏没有在相当的深度上数字化，因为通常在单个显微镜载玻片上存在代表数十个分类群的数千个标本，通常只有一到少数选定的标本通过手动显微镜摄影和/或分类标签记录。我们建议使用显微镜幻灯片扫描，然后通过计算机辅助分类索引，大大增加了收集挖掘和收集为基础的研究，可以提供的信息量。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识别和分子条形码，以实现基于收集的信息和领域之间的联系。

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.