Dr Glen Tarran

Dr Glen Tarran is interested in the use and development of technology to automate the analysis of plankton community structure through flow cytometry. He manages the PML flow cytometry facility and has a great deal of experience of using flow cytometry in a wide range of marine, freshwater and other applications involving plankton and many other particles suspended in water. He currently characterises and quantifies microbial communities with the NERC National Capability programmes of the Western (English) Channel Observatory and the Atlantic Meridional Transect.

His published papers relate to plankton community composition and dynamics, particularly in the open ocean, as well as a range of papers associated with the application of flow cytometry in aquatic ecology.

Flow cytometry is a generic technique for optically analysing and quantifying particles suspended in a medium. The analysis is multi-parametric, each particle can have two light scattering and 3 fluorescence properties measured simultaneously at rates up to 5000 particles per second. The PML's flow cytometers can also pick out (sort) sub-populations from samples to give pure samples, either for culturing, verification or rate measurements on specific components of a community. The flow cytometers at PML have been used to analyse phytoplankton, bacteria, viruses, silt, blood, beads, paint particles, squid ink, detergent bubbles, metazoan tissue cell suspensions, milk, oil and so on. Basically, if it's in suspension it can be measured.

Glen has over 100 peer-reviewed research papers and book chapters and has also published many data sets.