Functional Redundancy of the Global Ocean Microbiome

ended

This proposal relates to a recent debate of microbiology. Functional redundancy supposes that many taxa can realize the same functions. In this scenario, the composition of microbial communities could appear as a bad predictor of their effects on ecosystems. Functional redundancy among microbes has been suggested but also disproven, growing in a limiting debate for microbiology. Our project proposes an overview of microbial functions to answer to this debate. The innovation in our project consists in studying the ecology and redundancy of functions inferred by various methods. We will use state-of-the art microbiome datasets that spans the global ocean, enabling to study the impact of geographic scales on redundancy. The host and the candidate will bring together their complementary expertise on omics, statistics, microbes’ morphology, nutrition and interactions to compare for the first time the functionality of all microbial domains across the global ocean. Inferred functions will be analyzed against microbial taxonomy, environmental selection from abiotic variables and dispersal across the ocean to study their redundancy and ecological patterns. Novel cross-disciplinary tools will be developed that will expand the outreach of our project to research in omics (e.g. bioinformatics, computational biology), biogeochemistry, modelling, evolution or global changes. Morpho-trophic features of protistan taxa will be collected into a novel database that will represent their functional diversity. Finally, an innovative functional characterization of ecological networks will be developed to unveil the interplay between microbial interaction networks and environmental conditions. Researchers and policy-makers studying how microbes affects natural, engineered, or future ecosystems, will benefit from our project that represents a major leap forward for microbiology and functional ecology.