Diversity of marine protists: single cell genomics and imaging for Tara Oceans

最近的研究发现了海洋浮游原生生物（原生动物和其他真核微生物）具有巨大多样性的证据，与海洋细菌和古细菌的惊人多样性相匹配或超过。 了解这种多样性与海洋生态系统功能之间的关系至关重要，因为人类应对气候变暖和海洋酸化等全球变化的影响。 该项目的两个总体目标是：1）发现和比较海洋原生生物在海洋梯度上的多样性，2）产生占优势的、未培养的原生生物分类群的参考基因组，作为一个广泛的科学界的资源。这个证明-概念项目团队毕格罗海洋科学实验室的新单细胞基因组学中心与塔拉海洋探险队探索原生生物多样性跨越重要的海洋学梯度 塔拉海洋是一个独立资助的，为期三年的环球考察，以描述海洋浮游生物的多样性（www.example.com）。 这艘名为塔拉的船是一艘现代化的110英尺长的帆船，配备了干湿实验室和一套完整的海洋学仪器。 该探险队正在为基因组测序和数字成像原生生物形态学的高通量管道收集样本。 将从塔拉采集的样品中分选单个原生生物细胞。 将扩增分选的单个原生生物细胞的基因组，并使用DNA条形码对这些单个扩增基因组（SAG）进行遗传学筛选，以鉴定最丰富和多样化的分类群，用于进一步的基因组表征。 法国国家测序中心Genoscope已同意对数百个SAG进行测序（该项目不承担任何费用），以形成后续社区水平分子分析的参考基因组（其他塔拉海洋合作伙伴也将使用最先进的方法（如宏基因组学，元转录组学和pyrotagging）对平行样本进行测序）。 该项目的更广泛影响包括本科生和博士后学生的培训，以及参与毕格罗实验室和塔拉海洋平台的各种既定教育和推广计划。 此外，该项目还将创建一个大型海洋原生生物SAG库，以便存档并与其他有兴趣筛选特定基因或在未来进行全基因组测序的研究人员共享。

Recent studies have uncovered evidence for a huge store of diversity in marine planktonic protists (protozoa and other eukaryotic microorganisms), matching or exceeding the incredible diversity observed for marine bacteria and archaea. Understanding relationships between this diversity and ocean ecosystem function is critical as humans navigate the effects of global change such as climate warming and ocean acidification. The two overall goals of this project are: 1) to discover and compare the diversity of marine protists across ocean gradients, and 2) to generate reference genomes of dominant, uncultured protist taxonomic groups, to serve as a resource for a broad scientific community.This proof-of-concept project teams Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences' new Single Cell Genomics Center with the Tara Oceans Expedition to explore protistan diversity across important oceanographic gradients. Tara Oceans is an independently-funded, three-year, circum-global expedition to describe the diversity of marine plankton (oceans.taraexpeditions.org). The boat, Tara, is a modern 110-ft sailing schooner with wet and dry laboratories and a complete suite of oceanographic instruments. The expedition is collecting samples for high-throughput pipelines for genome sequencing as well as digital imaging protist morphology. Single protistan cells will be sorted from samples collected on Tara. The genomes of sorted single protist cells will be amplified, and these single amplified genomes (SAGs) will be phylogentically screened using DNA bar codes to identify the most abundant and diversed taxa for further genomic characterization. The French national sequencing center, Genoscope, has agree to sequence hundreds of SAGs (at no cost to this project) to form reference genomes for subsequent community-level molecular analyses (parallel samples will also be sequenced by other Tara Oceans partners using state-of the-art methods such as metagenomics, meta-transcriptomics, and pyrotagging). The broader impacts of this project include the training of undergraduate and postdoctoral students, and involvement in various established education and outreach programs at Bigelow Laboratory and via the Tara Oceans platform. In addition the project will create a large library of marine protist SAGs to be archived and shared with other researchers interested in screening them for specific genes or performing whole genome sequencing in the future.