About This Project

This project will characterize the microbial community structure and biodiversity of marine sediment within a national marine sanctuary. An important goal includes identifying sites with the highest potential for harboring bacteria (e.g. Streptomyces) that may contain novel biosynthetic gene clusters for natural product discovery. Metagenomics sequencing will quantify species at sites open vs. closed to fishing to inform fisheries management.

Ask the Scientists

What is the context of this research?

The ocean ecosystem covers more than 70% of the Earth's surface and the marine environment harbors a vast unexplored resource of microbial biodiversity. This knowledge is critical to assessing the health of the ocean's vital food web. In particular, the variety and types of species that reside at the water column and sediment interface is largely unknown. There are very large number of microbes with a virtually unexplored metabolic diversity that have had 3.5 billion years of mutations to yield high genetic variation. Breakthroughs in molecular sequencing and associated technological advances have revealed a novel “unculturable world” in which the microbial community can be examined directly from environmental samples.

What is the significance of this project?

There is a major scientific gap in the understanding of the extent to which microbial community biodiversity exists spatially across the vast geographic expanse of the marine environment. This knowledge is critical to understanding how the health and function of marine food web organisms. For example, a slight shift in the microbial communities structure can disrupt primary productivity and alter vital biogeochemical cycles that provide nutrient resources to mitigate over-fishing and pollution. Results will enable development of a procured DNA library of microbial species that will serve future novel discovery. What makes this project unique is that we are mapping the microbial diversity and screening the novel species that likely exist in a national marine sanctuary.

What are the goals of the project?

Sampling will begin with 2 major cruises in the summer and fall of 2018. The goal is to map the microbial community that live in surface sediment at benthic sites within a U.S. National Marine Sanctuary. The objectives are to characterize the microbial structure and test whether indicators of species abundance, richness and biodiversity vary in response to sites open compared to close to fishing. An additional goal is to screen for novel bacterial genomes to create novel biosynthetic gene cluster libraries with the highest potential for natural products. We will use a targeted metagenomic sequencing method to sequentially characterize small genome sized bacterial populations that reside exclusively in marine sediment habitat.