Biodiversity and vertical segmentation of microbial communities and gene expression in cold ocean ecosystems

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Cold oceans play a major role in global carbon fluxes and are the dominant type of marine environments around Canada. These waters were typically thought of as unstable with well-mixed surface layers and homogeneous, low-diversity plankton communities. Microbes include representatives from all major branches of life: Bacteria, Archaea and Eukaryota. These three domains interact to form complex food webs in any given parcel of water. Microbial food webs support all larger organisms dependent on Arctic Seas and are responsible for biogeochemical cycling on a global scale. The majority of free living microbes have never been cultured, we have only begun to understand the complexity of community structure by applying molecular biological techniques to investigate the ocean. Our work focuses on identifying the diversity and abundance of microbes and several key enzymes in Arctic Seas. Recent reports suggests that microbial diversity is 10 to 1000 times greater than previously thought and our data has confirmed diverse complex communities at different depths over different regions of the Arctic Ocean and surrounding seas. The Arctic is currently threatened with loss of ice cover due to global warming, which is impacting circulation patterns that influence microbial species distributions. Our objective is determine what species and biogeochemical pathways are likely to dominate in a changing arctic, providing key information for downstream modelling and management.