Collaborative Research: Relating microbial biodiversity to biological oceanographic processes

关于微生物群落的组成和功能与生物海洋学过程之间的关系，人们知之甚少。这在很大程度上是因为很难将基于分子生物学的群落组成测量纳入海洋学测量计划，尽管最近的数据表明，微生物多样性应该强烈影响许多生物地球化学过程。全群落分子指纹分析方法和高通量序列分析的新进展使这种整合成为可能。在这个项目中，PIs将在环境数据的背景下评估微生物群落的多样性，作为将分子遗传数据与可能在海洋的概念和数字模型中表示的过程联系起来的关键的第一步。该项目非常具有成本效益，因为不需要额外的实地工作。取而代之的是，PI将使用主要来自亚热带或热带地区的现有高质量生物海洋学数据。样本来自澳大利亚周围的西南太平洋，从夏威夷到海山皇后的北太平洋，包括亚马逊羽流在内的西热带大西洋，西佛罗里达大陆架上的墨西哥湾，以及洛杉矶和圣卡塔利纳岛之间的圣佩德罗海洋时间序列。分子和海洋数据将通过包括排序、聚类和规范分析在内的多变量统计技术进行分析。要解决的问题包括：物理化学参数是否构成微生物群落？一些微生物类群是否有规律地出现在一起，以及一些类群是否相互排斥？相关性能否被用来将某些分类群与特定的生物地球化学过程联系起来？该项目包括一个重要的探索性部分，预计将产生许多具体的假设来检验。结果将以数字方式存档，并可在可用时与有关海洋微生物多样性的新数据相结合。该项目的更广泛影响包括通过南加州大学的COSEE West计划与K-12教学建立联系，本科生和研究生的教学和研究，以及通过网站向普通公众推广。

Very little is known about how microbial community composition and function relate to biological oceanographic processes. This is largely due to the difficulty of integrating molecular biological-based community composition measurements into an oceanographic measurement program, even though recent data imply that microbial diversity should strongly affect many biogeochemical processes. New developments in whole-community molecular fingerprinting approaches and high throughput sequence analysis make such integration possible. In this project, the PIs will evaluate microbial community diversity in the context of environmental data, as a critical first step toward relating molecular genetic data to processes that may be represented in conceptual and numerical models of the ocean. The project is very cost effective because no additional fieldwork is requested. Instead, the PIs will use existing high quality biological oceanographic data from predominantly subtropical or tropical regions. Samples come from the SW Pacific around Australia, the North Pacific from Hawaii to Empress Seamount, the W Tropical Atlantic including the Amazon Plume, the Gulf of Mexico on the West Florida Shelf, and the San Pedro Ocean Time Series between Los Angeles and Santa Catalina Island. Molecular and oceanographic data will be analyzed by multivariate statistical techniques including ordination, cluster, and canonical analysis. Questions to be addressed include: Do physico-chemical parameters structure microbial communities? Do some microbial taxa appear together regularly, and are some taxa mutually exclusive? Can correlations be used to connect certain taxa to specific biogeochemical processes? The project includes a significant exploratory component, and is expected to generate numerous specific hypotheses to test. The results will be digitally archived and can be integrated with new data on marine microbial diversity as it becomes available. Broader impacts of the project include a connection to K-12 teaching through USC's COSEE West program, undergraduate and graduate student teaching and research, and outreach to the general public through a website.