In 2016, Ifremer launched the 'Pourquoi Pas les Abysses' (ABYSS) project as one of the MERLIN initiatives ('pour la MER, Lancement d'Initiatives Nouvelles ') which, building on both national and international partnerships, will contribute opening new horizons of research for the institute in complement of its present areas of expertise. ABYSS stems from the recognition that a lot of efforts are still required to appraise the richness and worldwide distribution of marine biodiversity, including the entire abyssal plain that constitutes the largest and less studied ecosystem on earth. Using New Generation Sequencing, ABYSS will contribute to a (re) evaluation of the biodiversity present in the abysses to better understand its evolution and the possible environmental drivers of its distribution. In order to perform the evaluation of deep-sea biodiversity (extent and nature) in deep-sea sediments, ABYSS's ambition is to gather the most representative set of samples possible worldwide, following a standardized and replicated scheme. In order to reach this ambitious goal, we need to access a diversity of geographic areas requiring either a dedicated circumnavigation (as the recent Malaspina or Tara expeditions), or an optimization of the use of ship time, taking advantage of opportunities offered by scheduled cruises and transits. This second option has been selected and is the aim of this proposal, which explains its atypical format. These transits are thus valorized in the framework of the cruise AMIGO 2018, with the objective to enrich the collection of the project ABYSS by collecting samples from the North Atlantic with a multitube corer. In the framework of the partnership with France Génomique (sister project eDNAbyss), we will evaluate with the Genoscope the feasibility to proceed to analysis during the cruises, by using the new possibilities offered by a miniaturized sequencing system, the Mini Ion Torrent (MinIon).