Diatoms of North AmericaDiatom DNA metabarcoding and emerging multi-omic technologies (such as single-cell genomics and environmental transcriptomics) rely on reference databases that link sequence data directly to verified frustule morphology. However, key North American freshwater diatoms remain underrepresented in public repositories, while the pool of trained taxonomists and resources available to generate reference barcodes is limited.
In this Diatom Web Academy presentation, we share results from a collaborative workflow developed during the Ecology and Systematics of Diatoms course at Iowa Lakeside Laboratory (May 2026). Over a two-day hands-on workshop, ten early-career researchers isolated 23 live single-cell and colony samples (10–500 cells) representing common freshwater taxa. Isolates were split into paired fractions for light-microscopy verification and high-throughput amplicon sequencing (rbcL and 18S V4).
