Exploring the use of metagenetic analyses to assess the biodiversity of marine nematodes.

Although nematodes play an important ecological role in all major ecosystems, their diversity is still largely unknown. The gap between ‘known’ and estimated species richness may be due to the limitations of morphological identification which is difficult, laborious and requires taxonomic expertise, meaning that biodiversity of the group is typically underestimated. To better understand the relationships between biodiversity and ecosystem functioning is crucially important a full assessment of biodiversity. This is particularly important for marine species and small-sized metazoa. The advent of molecular techniques and overall the development of next generation sequencing techniques (i.e. 454 sequencing) provide new perspectives to investigate the biodiversity of nematode assemblages.