BIOCHEMICAL AND MOLECULAR TOOLS TO MONITOR Posidonia oceanica (L.) Delile MEADOWS

Posidonia oceanica (L.) Delile is the dominant endemic seagrass in the Mediterranean Sea, where it forms highly productive meadows. Worldwide seagrass monitoring is an issue of increasing interest in research, management and policies, due to the ecological role of these ecosystems, their global decline and their ecological indicator characteristics. The choice and combination of measurable, sensitive and integrative descriptors that adequately reflect the environmental alterations is a challenge for the whole scientific community. This work has been devoted to the identification and development of different generation of "diagnostic" tools to be used in monitoring of the seagrass meadows conservation status. These tools are based on biochemical and molecular approaches that can provide early and reliable information on the ecophysiological status of plants (e.g. phenol determination, proteomics, RAPD genetic analysis, oxidative stress markers, etc.) Results provide evidences of their convenient application as markers of the health status of P. oceanica and/or other seagrass meadows; some of them are early-warning indicators of plant stress responses. Furthermore, the proposed tools are standardizable, provide detailed information about physiological status of the plants and can be integrated to the traditional methods of investigation. The approach proposed by this research project makes available several tools to establish the linkage between stressor and seagrass response and to better understand the effects of complex disturbances.