We plan to sample a lot of lakes one by one during several days, so we need something quick and reliable to characterize phytoplankton community.
Phycocyanin fluorescence is a fast and contrasted method that will trobalt give the quickest result. You can also use the specific cyanobacteria signature of this pigment in the Chemtax application, but that will take somewhat longer.
You can 16S sequencing. It isn't fast but it would give you a good idea of the number of cells. Alternative you could do a cell count with a Hemocytometer and count how many are there as well, but they will likely be very small and this may be difficult. Another method is using a cell counter (flow cytometry), but this wont distinguish the type of cells.
Dr. Egor Zadereev
Screening of phytopigments using reverse phase HPLC technique will give you an idea in bulk regarding the presence and to some extent the percentage of specific pigment harbouring cells. For example a detection and estimation of phycocyanin will give you perspective regarding the cyanophyceaen presence. This is also a quick way to detect them in addition to the methods mentioned. Apart from these, there are other microscpic evaluation techniques based on the differential staining which do yield reliable data but are time consuming and baised due to human errors; but are absolutely cheap and if performed diligently, yield moderate to good resuults.
Regards,
Dr. Abhishek Mukherjee
A FlouroProbe will be your best bet. It does in situ field measurements of the abundance of different phytoplankton groups including cyanobacteria. The FlouroProbe measures fluorescence and allocates phytoplankton into major algal groups.
Long wish I could afford a fluoroprobe. I use the haemocytometer and differential interference contrast on the microscope. Thinking about whether I can use my vis-spectrometer (not UV, sadly) To do quick throughput of samples. Any thoughts?
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