Líffræðifélag Íslands - biologia.is
Líffræðiráðstefnan 2019
Erindi/veggspjald / Talk/poster E62
Höfundar / Authors: Clara Anne Jégousse (1,2), Pauline Vannier (2), René Groben (2), Viggó Þór Marteinsson (1,2)
Starfsvettvangur / Affiliations: 1. Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Iceland, Reykjavík, Iceland; 2. Matís ohf., Reykjavík, Iceland
Kynnir / Presenter: Clara Anne Jégousse
To achieve a sustainable management of marine resources, we must explore and understand the ocean’s ecosystem. At the very basis of this ecosystem are marine microbes: single-cellular organisms organised in complex, interactive and dynamic communities controlling the flow of energy and nutrients essential to the upper levels of the food web. But little is known about the organisation of microbial communities in the ocean around Iceland using genomic data. Here we propose to resolve the composition, structure and potential function of these microbial communities using new generation sequencing. Metagenomics is the study of genomic material recovered directly from an environmental sample, i.e., analysing the genomic information of the whole microbial community together. Seawater samples were taken at the surface and the bottom of the ocean at hydrographic stations in the north and the south of Iceland to rextract DNA from the seawater. The DNA was later sequenced on HiSeq and the resulting DNA sequences were analysed to reveal variations in composition and structure in the marine microbial communities across the layers of the ocean. These results will help us to better explain microbial community dynamics and their impacts on the higher levels of the marine food web.