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动物(原生动物和其他真核微生物)具有巨大多样性的证据，与海洋细菌和古生物观察到的令人难以置信的多样性相当或超过。在人类应对气候变暖和海洋酸化等全球变化的影响时，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。这个项目的两个总体目标是：1)发现和比较海洋梯度上的海洋原生生物的多样性，2)生成主要的、未培养的原生生物分类组的参考基因组，作为广泛科学界的资源。这个概念验证项目将毕格罗海洋科学实验室新的单细胞基因组学中心与塔拉海洋探险合作，探索重要的海洋梯度上的原生生物多样性。Tara Ocean是一个独立资助的、为期三年的环游全球探险，旨在描述海洋浮游生物的多样性(Ocean ans.taraexfortions.org)。这艘名为塔拉的船是一艘110英尺长的现代帆船，拥有干湿实验室和一整套海洋仪器。探险队正在为高通量管道收集样本，用于基因组测序和数字成像原生生物形态。单个原生生物细胞将从塔拉星上收集的样本中进行分类。将对已分类的单个原生生物细胞的基因组进行扩增，并使用DNA条形码对这些单个扩增基因组(SAG)进行系统发育筛选，以识别最丰富和多样化的类群，以便进一步进行基因组特征描述。法国国家测序中心Gencope已同意对数百个SAG进行测序(这一项目不需要任何费用)，以形成参考基因组，用于随后的社区级分子分析(平行样本也将由Tara Ocean的其他合作伙伴使用最先进的方法进行测序，如元基因组学、转录组学和焦油标记)。该项目的更广泛影响包括对本科生和博士后的培训，以及参与毕格罗实验室和Tara Ocean平台的各种既定教育和推广计划。此外，该项目将创建一个大型海洋原生生物SAG文库，以存档并与其他有兴趣在未来筛选它们的特定基因或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.