GuestProfessor Shinichi SUNAGAWA
Marine microbes power the ocean. They absorb CO₂, produce about half of the oxygen on Earth, fuel marine food webs, and play essential roles in the health of marine animals such as sponges and corals. Yet we still lack a global understanding of their diversity, distribution, and ecological functions. Professor Sunagawa's research addresses these questions by working in international projects that have systematically sampled microbiomes across the global open ocean, European coastlines, and coral reefs (e.g. Tara Pacific / Tara Coral / Tara Ocean / Tara Europa). By integrating genome-resolved microbiome data with environmental measurements, his group aims to uncover the ecological principles that shape microbial communities and their roles in marine ecosystems, in particular through their biosynthetic potential.
Impact of Ocean Warming on Microbial Diversity and its Molecular Discovery Potential
Ocean microbial (here, bacteria and archaea) community structure and population diversification are governed by eco-evolutionary factors. Sampling of microbial community DNA (metagenomes) by research expeditions, such as the Tara Oceans Expedition, has generated a wealth of data over the past decades, facilitating the study of these factors at global scale. However, differences in sampling methods, fragmentation of research data across databases and the literature, as well as inconsistent processing and annotation of sequencing datasets have hampered integrative, reproducible and generalizable analyses. Building on the work of Tara Oceans, we have continuously collected and systematically processed ocean metagenomic datasets to develop the Ocean Microbiomics Database. Using this resource, we corroborate previous findings that seawater temperature can be predicted from microbial community compositions in photic ocean layers, and demonstrate that this result is generalizable across studies, methodological differences and geographic regions. We identify the relative abundance of congeneric, thermal niche-partitioned species as a key explanatory factor. Analyses of metagenome-assembled genomes from globally distributed species further support high dispersal and diversification of marine microbes into ecologically cohesive populations. This work highlights the potential of harmonized, large-scale microbiome data integration to uncover fundamental eco-evolutionary patterns in the global ocean. Its genome-resolved design further enables exploration of novel taxa, enzymes, and mobile genetic elements.
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