ocean

Unicellular eukaryotes are responsible for a massive amount of photosynthetic carbon fixation in marine systems. The smallest among these fall within the “pico” size fraction (<2 micrometers in diameter), are broadly distributed – from coastal to open-ocean environments – and are highly diverse. Picoeukaryotes contribute a significant proportion of the biomass and primary production within this size fraction, often rivaling their cyanobacterial counterparts Prochlorococcus and...

The deep-ocean accounts for the majority of the water on our planet. While the cold deep-ocean is the dominant nutrient-challenged ecosystem, hydrothermal vents represent oases along tectonically active areas of the seafloor. Hydrothermal vents and the surrounding cold deep-ocean each support unique communities of microbes and viruses that have become highly adapted to local conditions. Through cycles of infection and host cell lysis, bacteriophages (viruses that specifically infect...

As a deep subsurface biosphere is thought to be the biggest biosphere in the earth, it is very interesting to know the phylogenetic and functional diversity in such environments. However, there is a little biological information for them because it is very hard to recover whole microbial community by only culture-base methods. In that sense, metagenomics is one of major useful methods to elucidate the microbial flora in unknown biosphere, which seems to be constructed by mainly unculturable...

Each metagenome study of a complex habitat is accompanied by lots of unknowns as so far the depth of sequencing is usually insufficient to reveal the entire microbial community of an ecosystem. The probably easiest way of extracting meaningful information is the comparison with existing data, analogous to that of genome comparisons. However, the complexity within the analysis chain of a single metagenome annotation is topped by the difficulties that the integration of heterogeneously analyzed...

Reconstructing Asian Monsoon History from Chinese Speleothems; Kathleen R. Johnson, Department of Earth System Science, University of California, Irvine: While we know that modern anthropogenic climate change is superimposed upon significant natural climate variability, the instrumental record of climate is too short to capture the full range of this variability. In order to fully understand and predict future changes, therefore, high-resolution, welldated paleoclimate records are needed to...

Dr. Jeffrey Krause explains the potential effect of global climate change on the ocean's phytoplankton and marine ecosystems. (CLIMECO Summer School, Brest France 2008; CLIMECO Summer School was sponsored by IMBER, EUR-OCEANS and WCRP).

Emperor penguins can flourish in locales where few other animals roam. But scientists now wonder if they can adapt to a new threat: climate change.

Coral reefs are dying a death of a thousand cuts and their disappearance threatens not only the incredibly diverse ecosystem that depends on them, but also human health and welfare. In this episode of MicrobeWorld Video marine scientists Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, Ph.D. , chair of marine studies at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, and Kiho Kim, Ph.D. , director of the environmental studies program at American University, explain the important relationship between microbes...