November 13th

The next session will be about functional diversity with Pierre Ramond.

DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS: making porTRAITs of all known protists, including the elusive Retaria
Protists harbor a tremendous diversity of morphology, physiology, behaviors, and life strategies. This diversity can be compiled in the form of traits and modalities, which capture their functional roles and allow us to predict their performance in ecosystems. We applied this trait-based approach to a collection of environmental metabarcoding datasets from the global ocean, annotating over 2,000 protistan taxa with 14 functional traits drawn from more than 1,500 references. To validate our work, we compared our annotations with those of Miguel Sandin, expert on Polycystine Radiolarians. This comparison of about 80 taxa, provided a valuable expert benchmark that helped us qualify our large-scale non-expert annotation effort, but also highlighted a) challenges in accessing expert information, and b) the need for a shared and well-defined trait terminology.
Building on this experience, we started a working group called “Protist Ontology and Resources on TRAITs” (PORTRAIT) to unify terminology across taxa and integrate trait information into reference databases such as PR2. Key challenges include assembling a comprehensive list of described protistan taxa, harmonizing taxonomic jargon and trait definitions across lineages, and addressing the scarcity of public information—particularly acute for Retaria which remains among the least documented protistan groups. In this context, initiatives such as The Life of Retaria are highly beneficial, providing a unified community of experts that can greatly facilitates ontology development and trait annotation for specific groups.
Building a census of all described protistan species and their traits based on a shared ontology is an achievable goal and a great perspective to gain and share knowledge on protist biology, ecology, and evolution at large.