Wednesday, August 10, 2016: 8:30 AM
Grand Floridian Blrm C, Ft Lauderdale Convention Center
Holly Bik, Center for Genomics & Systems Biology, New York University, New York, NY
Background/Question/Methods
The deep sea (habitats >200m, beyond continental shelf depth) is the largest ecosystem on earth, yet, less than 0.01% of the deep-sea floor has been sampled and studied in depth. In marine sediments, microbial eukaryotes (e.g. nematodes, fungi, protists, and other 'minor' metazoan phyla) are diverse and abundant, yet for most groups we possess scant knowledge of species distributions and evolutionary patterns. Using environmental sequencing approaches—rRNA marker gene studies and shotgun metagenomics—we now have the ability to deeply characterize uncultured assemblages of microbial eukaryotes. However, the sheer volume of data produced from high-throuhput sequencing technologies requires fundamentally different methodological workflows and new paradigms for effective data analysis.
Results/Conclusions
This talk will discuss recent environmental sequencing work in marine environments (Illumina HiSeq/MiSeq studies of deep-sea and Arctic sediments), including the use of data visualization tools to explore biological patterns in large sequence datasets. Analysis of environmental 18S rRNA amplicons suggests that most most microbial eukaryotes have restricted geographic distributions in marine sediments. However, a subset of taxa display putatively cosmopolitan distributions, or alternatively, exhibit low genetic divergence across large geographic distances. Furthermore, depth appears to be one of the most important drivers of community structure in benthic marine habitats. Future work will expand these environmental -Omic efforts, including targeted genome sequencing of individual specimens, in order to shed further light on preliminary insights and link environmental sequence data with known taxonomic IDs.
