Oceans hide an unknown biological reserve – La Prensa (Nicaragua)

Ocean View from Goleta, California. PRESS / AFP / David McNew

An international team of scientists has completed the sequencing of 35,000 genes million species of marine bacteria, 80% which were unknown until now, in research published today in “Science” in a special issue.

The results are the fruit of thousands of samples collected in oceans around the world, including the surface and 900 meters deep, between 2009 and 2013 on board the yacht “Tara” in the scientific expedition “Tara Oceans”, which, according to scientists, has allowed to describe the diversity of plankton in the oceans.

The project has involved, among others, scientists from the Institute of the Sea (ICM-CSIC) in Barcelona Science.

According to the CSIC researcher at the ICM, Silvia G. Acinas, among the challenges future is to determine the function performed by the new genes discovered to see what may have potential use in biotechnology and biomedicine.

One of the achievements of the expedition, which involved a hundred scientists from different countries It is, according Acinas, “which described the microbial diversity on a global scale and at a level previously unthinkable resolution through the use of massive sequencing of DNA and RNA.”

Acinas led the study ocean microbiome with researchers at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (Germany) and the Vlaams Instituut voor Biotechnologie (Belgium).

The international and interdisciplinary team of researchers has developed a map of biodiversity of viruses, bacteria, archaea and protists and explored their interactions and the impact of their environment, especially temperature, studying part of the 35,000 samples collected during four years in oceans around the world, resources “unprecedented in the scientific community”.

Acinas stressed that in the seas inhabit most life forms on the planet, the microscopic marine plankton

The plankton consists of microscopic organisms. viruses, bacteria, archaea , protists and small multicellular eukaryotes that produce half of the oxygen, act as sinks for CO2, influence climate and form the base of the food chain to fish and marine mammals feed.

Researchers of the expedition “Tara Oceans” have sequenced more than 7.2 trillion base pairs of DNA from marine microbial communities, a volume of sequencing a thousand times greater than any previous study of marine diversity of the microbiome sequencing or other environments.

So, they have generated a database of 40 million genes called “Ocean Microbial Gene Reference Catalog”, 80% of which are new.

“One of the more surprising results was detected that 67% of the genes of the microbiome of the ocean are shared by all bacteria and archaea marinas, “he stated the researcher.

The research of” Tara Oceans “have focused in the study of the “dermis” of the ocean, that is, from the surface up to 900 meters deep.

This data “will be complemented by the results of the expedition” Malaspina “, led by CSIC and in which also participated the ICM, who collected samples of ocean up to 4,000 meters deep, “he pointed Acinas.

Researchers have also studied the influence of environmental factors such as temperature , pH and nutrients in the ocean floating microscopic organisms.

have thus seen that, depending on the water temperature, are different microbial communities or ocean eddies, as stream Agulhas-a natural barrier between the Indian Ocean and the South Atlantic, separating the planktonic communities.

The expedition “Tara Oceans” is backed by the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (France), the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (Germany) and the Commissariat lénergie Atomique et aux Energies Alternatives (France) and with the participation of various public and private institutions.