Ana Baricevic

• PhD
• Research Associate at Rudjer Boskovic Institute

The Northern Adriatic is a dynamic and the most productive part of the Adriatic Sea. The phytoplankton of the Northern Adriatic is, as many studies in this area showed, under heavy influence of freshwater inputs and anthropogenic pressures. Cluster analysis of a more than 20 year phytoplankton data set across steep spatio-temporal, ecological gradi...

DNA metabarcoding of benthic diatoms has been successfully applied for biomonitoring at the national scale and can now be considered technically ready for routine application. However, protocols and methods still vary between and within countries, limiting their transferability and the comparability of results. In order to overcome this, routine us...

In this review, we toxicologically assessed the naturally occurring toxin domoic acid. We used the One Health approach because the impact of domoic acid is potentiated by climate change and water pollution on one side, and reflected in animal health, food security, human diet, and human health on the other. In a changing environment, algal blooms a...

Marine microbial communities form the basis for the functioning of marine ecosystems and the conservation of biodiversity. With the application of metagenomics and metatranscriptomics in marine environmental studies, significant progress has been made in analysing the functioning of microbial communities as a whole. These molecular techniques are h...

Plankton studies serve as a basis for marine ecosystem research, but knowledge of marine plankton is still incomplete due to its extreme taxonomic and functional complexity. The application of metabarcoding is very valuable for the characterisation of the plankton community. The plankton community of the Southern Adriatic is subject to strong envir...

The overexploitation of the western Pacific Ocean has expanded the sea cucumber fishery into new regions to supply the Asian market. In 2013, sea cucumbers were removed from the Croatian marine protected species list, and commercial fishery took place for a short period (2017–2018) in the Eastern Adriatic Sea. However, holothuroid species are diffi...

Background The northern Adriatic is characterised as the coldest and most productive marine area of the Mediterranean, which is due to high nutrient levels introduced by river discharges, the largest of which is the Italian Po River (at the same time also the largest freshwater input into the Mediterranean). The northern Adriatic is a very shallow...

Heterotrophic flagellates (HF) represent an important protist group in marine ecosystem functioning. Characterised by high taxonomic diversity, identification and classification of HF is often difficult using classical methods of light microscopy (LM). Complementing LM with molecular methods, such as barcoding, enables reliable taxonomic identifica...

Implementation of DNA metabarcoding for diatoms for environmental monitoring is now moving from a research to an operational phase, requiring rigorous guidelines and standards. In particular, the first steps of the diatom metabarcoding process, which consist of sampling and storage, have been addressed in various ways in scientific and pilot studie...

Diatoms of the genus Pseudo-nitzschia are cosmopolitans spread in seas and oceans worldwide, with more than 50 described species, dozens of which have been confirmed to produce domoic acid (DA). Here, we characterized and investigated the toxicological activity of secondary metabolites excreted into the growth media of different Pseudo-nitzschia sp...

The development of DNA metabarcoding and High-Throughput Sequencing for diatoms is nowadays offering an interesting approach to assess their communities in freshwater and marine ecosystems. In the context of the implementation of these genomic methods to environmental monitoring, protocol constraints are moving from scientific to operational applic...

The northern Adriatic is highly productive and shallow area characterized by numerous spatio-temporal gradients (e.g. nutrients, salinity, temperature). It is strongly influenced by numerous freshwater inputs, mainly from Po river. Its current systems as well as Po river, generates gradients of phosphate availability with an expressed N/P imbalance...

The marine benthic dinoflagellate genus Ostreopsis is known to produce a range of ovatoxins and palytoxins the most potent non-protein marine toxins known so far Presence and related harmful algal blooms of Ostreopsis species are documented in the Adriatic Sea. Negative impacts on marine benthic organism as well as on human health are recorded. Sti...

During the past decade genetic approaches have been developed to monitor biodiversity in aquatic ecosystems. These enable access to taxonomic and genetic information from biological communities using DNA from environmental samples (e.g. water, biofilm, soil) and methods based on high-throughput sequencing technologies, such as DNA metabarcoding. Wi...

Diatoms (Bacillariophyta) are ubiquitous microalgae, which present a huge taxonomic diversity, changing in correlation with differing environmental conditions. This makes them excellent ecological indicators for various ecosystems and ecological problematics (ecotoxicology, biomonitoring, paleo-environmental reconstruction …). Current standardized...

This study aims to validate the stable carbon isotopic composition (δ¹³C) of phytoplankton as a tool for detecting submarine leakages of anthropogenic CO2(g), since it is characterised by δ¹³C values significantly lower than the natural CO2 dissolved in oceans. Three culture experiments were carried out to investigate the changes in δ¹³C of the dia...

Ecological assessment of lakes and rivers using benthic diatom assemblages currently requires considerable taxonomic expertise to identify species using light microscopy. This traditional approach is also time-consuming. Diatom metabarcoding is a promising alternative and there is increasing interest in using this approach for routine assessment. H...

Seasonal changes of microbial abundance and associated extracellular enzymatic activity in marine snow and in seawater were studied in the northern Adriatic during a three year period. Marine snow was present during the entire investigated period, although with higher concentrations during summer than during winter. Microorganisms densely colonized...

Chaetoceros peruvianus is a marine diatom species with circumglobal distribution. While frequently observed, it appears never to dominate the marine phytoplankton community hence it can be characterized as a rather opportunistic, generalistic species. Here we present ecological interpretations from a long-term data set on marine microphytoplankton...

Circumglobal distribution of C. peruvianus observations accumulated in the global biodiversity information facility GBIF. (TIF)

Skeletonema grevillei Sarno et Zingone was described in 2005. from the original type material. Cells were delicate, 4–7.5 μm in diameter, and formed short colonies. The fultoportulae processes in the terminal valves were open tubes having narrow tips with truncated or spiny margins. In the intercalary valves, they formed knuckle-like generally 1:1...

To study zooplankton–phytoplankton relationships in the diatom-dominated plankton communities of the northern Adriatic we performed feeding experiments with diatoms and zoea I larvae of the brachyuran Xantho poressa. We found that zoea I of X. poressa feed on diatoms of different forms (centric, pennate, colony forming, single celled, with or witho...

The diatom genus Skeletonema is globally distributed and often an important constituent of the phytoplankton community. In the marine phytoplankton of the northern Adriatic Sea, we found three species of the genus Skeletonema: Skeletonema menzelii, Skeletonema marinoi and Skeletonema grevillei. Making use of the steep ecological gradients that char...

The temperature increase in oceans reflects on marine ecosystem functioning and surely has consequences on the marine carbon cycle and carbon sequestration. In this study, we examined dissolved lipid, lipid classes and dissolved organic carbon (DOC) production in the northern Adriatic Sea, isolated diatom Chaetoceros pseudocurvisetus batch cultures...

Purpose: Ultraviolet (UV) radiation-induced apoptosis enabled us to study the mechanism of DNA damage and to investigate how cells avoid consequences of damaged DNA. Cells with extensive DNA damage activate extrinsic and intrinsic pathways of apoptosis. The extrinsic pathway is coupled to a FAS-associated protein with death domain (FADD), an adapt...

The esterase activity of carbonic anhydrase (CA) was investigated in mussels sampled at 24 locations along the Croatian coast of Adriatic Sea. The gills were the target tissue because the respiratory, ionic transport and pH regulatory enzyme function of CA and its potential usage as biomarkers of environmental pollution was the main topic. Total es...

The adaptational changes in cellular fatty acids and morphology of ?-Proteobacteria belonging to different genera (Vibrio, Halomonas, Pseudoalteromonas) isolated from northern Adriatic waters and cultured in four media (Marine Broth, R2 Broth and tenfold dilutions of both) were investigated. The bacterial strains with identical 16S rRNA sequences i...

To become a cancer cell, a cell must inactivate apoptosis in order to avoid dying. This model predicts that cancer cells are more resistant to DNA damaging agents because they have deactivated the apoptotic pathway. Apoptotic signal caused by UVC radiation triggers intrinsic or mitochondrial apoptotic pathway. Other apoptotic pathway is coupled dir...

This study reports the development of a tool to characterise and differentiate northern Adriatic waters, particularly oligotrophic, high-salinity waters, based on the cellular fatty acids of culturable heterotrophic bacterioplankton. The growth abilities and population dominance were observed for particle-attached and free-living bacteria cultured...

Genes of the p53 family are known to be critical regulators of the cell cycle. They have already been established as possible biomarkers. Elaborate regulation mechanisms result in numerous cDNA and protein isoforms being expressed from each gene of the p53 family. Their similarity caused an often misleading nomenclature in non-vertebrate species. T...