Electron microscopy is a source of innovative studies for marine models such as viruses, bacteria, unicellular algae, marine metazoans. The Oceanological Observatory of Banyuls-sur-Mer has a transmission electron microscope: Hitachi 7500 equipped with a high-resolution camera, AMT advantage.

The department also has a sample preparation laboratory, a room equipped with 2 Ultra microtomes: a Leica, an LKB and cryo-sample preparation instruments: Leica .EM AFS2 and GP.

Some examples of applications on marine models studied in the observatory:

Ostreococcus tauri

Ostreococcus tauri is the smallest free eukaryote known. It is a 1μm green alga with a basic structure consisting of a nucleus, a chloroplast, a mitochondria and a golgi apparatus (Courties et al., Nature 1994). Discovered in the pond of Thau where it abounds, it is also present in all the oceans. It has become a study model for cell biology and marine ecology.

Since fish do not have a pupil, they adapt to light at the level of the retina. Ultrafine sections (about 60 nm) of the retina, taken day and night, show that it is the migration of photoreceptors in the retinal epithelium that allows accommodation to light.