Speaker
Description
We all know that activities and interactions of microbes in the wild underpin the biogeochemical cycles that support earth’s biomes, and the modern climate that we love so well. As in other ecosystems, in the oceans these activities can be difficult to measure particularly in connection with molecular mechanisms or in a manner that identifies the key members responsible for an activity. Likewise, dissecting cell-to-cell interactions, be they between different bacteria, bacteria and protists, or viruses and their hosts, remains a major challenge – impeding the alacrity with which networks of interaction can be modelled. Here we will discuss new insights into microbial activities and interactions in both the surface ocean and the deep sea. The studies rely on a suite of innovations for experimental work in the ocean and ‘single cell genomics’ wherein an individual microbe is captured with a co-associated biological entity, sequenced, and analyzed. Through these studies we are identifying symbioses, pathogenic interactions, virus-host pairs that remain uncultured, and even mechanisms of export for cells that are too small to sink on their own accord from the surface ocean. Collectively, this research identifies new aspects of ecology that shape our knowledge of linkages within marine food webs and the carbon cycle, as well as evolutionary and genomic aspects of microbes.
