Summary
BIOcean5D (B5D) unites 26 partners from 11 European countries, to build a unique suite of protocols allowing holistic re-exploration of marine biodiversity, from viruses to mammals, from genomes to holobionts, across large spatial and temporal scales from pre-industrial to modern time. To explore coastal biodiversity across space and drivers, we realized the TREC and Tara EUROPA expeditions, during which a fleet of floating and rolling mobile laboratories synchronously collected over 70K samples for cutting-edge meta-omics analyses in 115 land-to-sea gradients along the EU coastline from Finland to Greece. This represents the largest baseline dataset to explore life across the Earth ecosystems, including local and global anthropogenic pressures. To explore biodiversity across time, B5D utilizes comparative analyses between long-term plankton time-series. These are crucial for understanding how microbial communities change over time due to ecological and evolutionary processes, and very relevant in the context of global change. Comparing marine time series from similar environments can provide valuable insights into the degree of determinism versus idiosyncrasy in microbial turnover, as well as into its relationship with functional redundancy and self-organization processes. We will showcase results from the comparison of two long-term microbial time series from the Mediterranean Sea, examining microbiome turnover at genomic, taxonomic, and population levels. B5D also explores marine coastal biodiversity changes over the last 2 centuries by analyzing ancient DNA in sediment cores. The potential of such a sedimentary paleogenomic data will be illustrated by our recent studies in the Bay of Brest (North Atlantic) and New Caledonia (South Pacific), and the ongoing Paleocore project developed in the frame of TREC and BIOcean5D.
Brief biography
Raffaele Siano obtained his PhD in 2008 in the Stazione Zoologica A. Dohrn, Naples and is a researcher at Ifremer in in Brest (Brittany, France)). He has a background in plankton taxonomy and ecology, especially of dinoflagellates. He studies the consequences of human activities and natural events on biodiversity patterns and HAB species distribution, development and spreading in coastal ecosystems. He is using environmental DNA (eDNA), extracted from the water column and sediments, to monitor changes in biodiversity about human activities and coastal stakeholders’ needs. He has been focusing on paleogenetic studies to assess microbial community changes and multidecadal patterns of HAB species during the Anthropocene. He is the scientific coordinator of the eDNA monitoring system in France ROME (Réseau d’Observatoires de Microbiologie Environnmentale integrée) aiming at estuarine ecosystem protection and oyster aquaculture sustainability. He coordinates the sediment biome sampling and analyses for the exploration TREC.
Ramiro Logares got his PhD at Lund University, Sweden. Since 2010, he has been at the ICM-CSIC where today, he is leading a research team on microbial computational ecology and evolution. His main research lines aim at 1) understanding the structuring and dynamics of natural microbial communities using ecological theory, 2) disentangling the network of microbial interactions in ecosystems, and 3) linking the gene content of genomes, communities, and their variation, with ecological function and evolutionary processes. He is involved in the European projects BIOcean5D and OneBlue, the Biodiversa+ project PetriMed, and participates in the TREC expedition.
Colomban de Vargas obtained his PhD in molecular ecology and evolution in 2000 at the University of Geneva, Switzerland. He was then a post-doc at Harvard University, and an Assistant Professor at Rutgers University, USA, before joining the CNRS, France, in 2007. He has been studying microbial life's biodiversity, ecology, and evolution, essentially eucaryotes from the marine plankton, and its co-evolution with the Earth System. Participating in >30 oceanographic cruises, CdV has coordinated major European (e.g. BioMarKs, BIOcean5D) and international (the ‘Tara’ expeditions, TREC, Plankton Planet) ocean exploration research programs. By developing and applying innovative protocols to explore the genetic and morphological diversity of microbial life across large taxonomic, spatial, temporal, and ecological scales, his work contributes to the emergent field of Planetary Microbial Systems Biology.