Created 22/02/2016 Updated 15/02/2017
29 May
2015

On May 22, in a special issue of Science, an international, interdisciplinary, team of scientists maps the biodiversity of a wide range of planktonic organisms, exploring their interactions - mainly parasitic, and how they impact and are affected by their environment, primarily the temperature.

The special issue reports on the detailed mapping of the planktonic biodiversity in the world's oceans by an international interdisciplinary team of scientists during the 2009 - 2013 expedition of the schooner TARA. The papers explore interactions among the various organisms and their environment in detail. The massive amount of material and data collected during this expedition will provide the scientific community at large with unprecedented resources, including a catalogue of several million new genes, which will transform how we study the oceans and assess climate change.

EMBRC provided facilities and infrastructure in support of this effort via its French and Italian nodes in CNRS-UPMC Station Biologique de Roscoff & Observatoire Océanologique de Villefranche-sur-Mer and in the Stazione Zoologica Anton Dohrn.

It is great to see marine biology on the cover of a high impact scientific journal and highlights the important role that marine biology can play in the life sciences. These are the first results from the TARA Oceans program, published in a prominent journal, and we are likely to see more exciting results as scientists drill further down into the collected material.

 

 

Uncovering hidden worlds of ocean biodiversity; E. Virginia Armbrust and Stephen R. Palumbi ; Science ; 22 mai 2015.
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Tara Oceans studies plankton at planetary scale ; Bork et al ; Science ; 22 mai 2015.
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Eukaryotic plankton diversity in the sunlit ocean ; De Vargas, Audic, Henry, et al ; Science ; 22 mai 2015.
DOI: 10.1126/science.1261605

Structure and function of the global ocean microbiome ; Sunagawa, Coelho, Chaffron, et al ; Science ; 22 mai 2015.
DOI: 10.1126/science.1261359

Patterns and ecological drivers of ocean viral communities ; Brum, Ignacio-Espinosa, Roux et al ; Science ; 22 mai 2015.
DOI: 10.1126/science.1261498

Determinants of community structure in the global plankton interactome ; Lima-Mendez, Faust, Henry et al ; Science ; 22 mai 2015.
DOI: 10.1126/science.1262073

Environmental characteristics of Agulhas rings affect inter-ocean plankton transport ; Villar, Farrant, Follows et al ; Science ; 22 mai 2015.
DOI: 10.1126/science.1261447