Imaging Marine Life – Modern Imaging Techniques in Marine Biology

Emmanuel G. Reynaud is heading the Tara Oceans Marine biology Imaging platform (TAOMI). Having obtained his PhD in Life Sciences from the University of Paris XI/Orsay, he spent most of his career working the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg Germany where he developed new optical method applied to biology including laser nanosurgery approaches. He was also involved in the development of the Light Sheet based Fluorescence Microscopy as a member of the Light Microscopy Group headed by Ernst H.K. Stelzer at EMBL. The TAOMI platform is on board the schooner Tara for a three years circumnavigation of the world ocean to collect and image the largest collection of marine species spanning from viruses to corals. This unique platform is duplicated on land to perform high throughput confocal analysis of plankton, X-ray tomography as well as cryo-electron microscopy. TAOMI combines underwater imaging with cytometry, stereomicroscopy, fluorescence microscopy and 3D microscopy.