PCR from the CPR offers a historical perspective marine population ecology

The Continuous Plankton Recorder (CPR) survey has collected plankton samples from regular tracks across the world's oceans for almost 70 y. Over 299,000 spatially extensive CPR samples are archived and stored in buffered formalin. This CPR archive offers huge potential to study changes in marine communities using molecular data from a period Mien marine pollution, exploitation and global anthropogenic impact were much less pronounced. However, to harness the amount of data available within the CPR archive fully, it is necessary to improve techniques of larval identification, to genus and species preferable, and to obtain genetic information for historical studies of population ecology. To increase the potential of the CPR database this paper describes the first extraction, amplification by the polymerase chain reaction and utilization of a DNA sequence (mitochondrial 16S rDNA) from it CPR sample, a formalin fixed larval sandeel.