Unique facilities
Live Organism Experimentation Laboratory (LEOV)
The laboratory facilities are controlled and automated for experimental research with marine and freshwater aquatic organisms.
They are made available to certified staff and researchers trained to handle and experiment with a wide variety of organisms. A high-performance computing cluster (HPCC) connected to these facilities enables mass data storage and analytical processing.
Equipment and features:
The LEOV consists of five temperature-controlled rooms and a large area of common aquariums, all supplied with ordinary seawater and dechlorinated freshwater.
One of the rooms has natural light for the proper maintenance of photoautotrophic organisms. Another is dedicated to the cultivation of gametes and larval stages. There are two other rooms equipped with state-of-the-art automated monitoring of small multicellular organisms (1-10 mm) and schools of fish (10-50 cm) in comparatively large environments (2 m x 2 m). It is one of the few facilities with these characteristics worldwide. The aquariums are complemented by an automatic aeration system and custom-developed systems to control environmental variables (O2, T, additions of inorganic and organic nutrients, water renewal rates in tanks, etc.) over the course of experiments.
We use custom-developed electronics to automatically programme environmental variables that change during controlled experiments, including water level, temperature, oxygen rate and nutrient additions, as well as the automated provision of food, plastic particles or predator signals, among others. There is also controlled monitoring of animals and environmental variables with automatic notifications to ensure that maintenance and animal welfare are maintained at an optimal level. Additionally, we use custom-developed recording and tracking software to acquire large amounts of individual and group behaviour data automatically. This behaviour information (videos, images, sensor data) can be easily stored and processed in the high-performance computing cluster, offering great advantages for efficient data management and analysis.
At the LEOV, we are currently studying a wide range of species and model organisms (for example: C. elegans; O. lobularis), from invertebrate gametes, larvae and dissociated sponge cells to macroalgae, sea urchins and fish.
Since we are incorporating new equipment designed for experiments with vertebrate animals (mainly fish), we are training CEAB-CSIC staff according to government regulations, which will open up a whole range of studies that were previously not possible.
Scientific goals:
The lab pursues three main goals:
- To foster the experimental research capacity of the CEAB-CSIC working teams.
- To attract experimental activity by teams of nearby scientific institutions (universities, research centres, etc.), as well as by other stakeholders (public bodies, companies and foundations).
- To facilitate and promote experimental research in areas such as biodiversity, ecology or biotechnology, becoming a frontline scientific-technical service.
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