Ciliates are a major group of unicellular, eukaryotic organisms (protists) that play important roles in nearly all ecosystems and serve as model organisms for basic research in genetics and cell function. Approximately 7500 species are known, but three times that many may be undiscovered, especially in poorly explored places like tropical forests or the deep ocean. Better knowledge of the biodiversity of ciliates would translate into more effective management of ecosystems or new model organisms for biomedical research, but achieving this has been slower and more difficult than has been the case for multicellular organisms. Modern studies of biodiversity often use DNA from preserved specimens but there is no such archive for ciliates. Also, sequencing most genes has been more challenging for ciliates than for animals or plants. Lastly, researchers who study biodiversity of ciliates are scattered thinly and unevenly across the world, and many are younger investigators who have little money for traveling to meetings or other laboratories to build collaborations.
The International Research Coordination Network for Biodiversity of Ciliates (IRCN-BC) will be an international collaboration that will lower barriers to research on ciliate biodiversity, generate new collaborations, establish procedures for archiving material, and, most significantly, stimulate research that will unite the taxonomic, genetic, and functional dimensions of biodiversity. The IRCN-BC will accomplish these goals by sponsoring workshops and symposia to build strategies and develop techniques, by creating archives for preserved samples of cells and DNA, by maintaining a website to report activities, attract new members, promote collaborations, and share data, and by funding travel for researchers. The IRCN-BC will be a model for accelerating multidimensional investigation of biodiversity in other protistan groups. Students at Minority Serving Institutions (MSIs) traditionally get scant exposure to areas of biology outside biomedicine. The IRCN-BC will create an email listserv of contacts at MSIs to inform faculty and students about the IRCN-BC, especially connections between biodiversity and biomedicine. Students from underrepresented minority groups (African-American, Pacific Islander) will be targeted for inclusion in two workshops.
