| Summary: | International audience Preserving the oceans is a major challenge for the 21st century. In 2000, the Water Framework Directive harmonised European regulations on water management in order to protect and restore the good status of aquatic ecosystems, including the marine environment and coastlines [1]. At present, few methods are suitable for diagnosing marine waters [2], so there is a real need for analytical tools to assess the level of toxicity in these environments [3][4][5].This observation gave rise to the European MOBILTOX project, the aim of which is to provide a response to this metrology issue, in particular through the development of a microbial biosensor. This biosensor relies on a strategy based not on a monospecific approach (a single microbial strain used, as is the case with the majority of approaches currently being developed) but on a set of micro-organisms representative of the indigenous microbial populations of these marine/littoral environments. Consequently, the choice of 'representative' micro-organisms (bioindicators) is crucial.The first step in this project was to sample seawater in Roscoff (Finistère, France) with the collaboration of the Station Biologique de Roscoff (national reference station for Europe's north-west Atlantic coasts) and to highlight its phenotypic properties using Biolog®'s Phenotype Microarrays for Microbial Cells technology. It was found that the microbial composition of the environmental inoculum has the capacity to metabolise different sources of carbon, nitrogen, sulphur and phosphorus. At the same time, a panel of 40 bacterial strains representative of this environment was acquired from the strain bank at the Station Biologique de Roscoff. In this way, the use of representative strains that are easily cultivated, commercially available if required, and non-pathogenic is favoured. These strains were characterised using the same Biolog® method in order to establish the phenotype of each of them. The aim was to identify one or more strains that covered the ...
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