Project description:Monitoring microbial communities can aid in understanding the state of these habitats. Environmental DNA (eDNA) techniques provide efficient and comprehensive monitoring by capturing broader diversity. Besides structural profiling, eDNA methods allow the study of functional profiles, encompassing the genes within the microbial community. In this study, three methodologies were compared for functional profiling of microbial communities in estuarine and coastal sites in the Bay of Biscay. The methodologies included inference from 16S metabarcoding data using Tax4Fun, GeoChip microarrays, and shotgun metagenomics.
Project description:Phytoplankton transform inorganic carbon into thousands of biomolecules, including polar metabolites that represent an important pool of labile fixed carbon, nitrogen, and sulfur. Metabolite production is not identical among phytoplankton, and the flux of these molecules through the microbial loop depends on compound-specific bioavailability to a wider microbial community. Yet relatively little is known about the diversity or concentration of polar metabolites within marine plankton. Here we evaluate 313 metabolites in 21 phytoplankton species and in natural marine particles across environmental gradients to show that bulk community metabolomes reflect the phytoplankton community on a chemical level.
