Structure and function of the global ocean microbiome

2015/05/22 by Shinichi Sunagawa, Luís Pedro Coelho, Samuel Chaffron +56 · 20 citations
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · Environmental Science · #Genomics and Phylogenetic Studies #Methane Hydrates and Related Phenomena #Microbial Community Ecology and Physiology

paper · doi:10.1126/science.1261359

openalex publication_date 2015/05/22 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/04

Abstract

Microbes are dominant drivers of biogeochemical processes, yet drawing a global picture of functional diversity, microbial community structure, and their ecological determinants remains a grand challenge. We analyzed 7.2 terabases of metagenomic data from 243 Tara Oceans samples from 68 locations in epipelagic and mesopelagic waters across the globe to generate an ocean microbial reference gene catalog with >40 million nonredundant, mostly novel sequences from viruses, prokaryotes, and picoeukaryotes. Using 139 prokaryote-enriched samples, containing >35,000 species, we show vertical stratification with epipelagic community composition mostly driven by temperature rather than other environmental factors or geography. We identify ocean microbial core functionality and reveal that >73% of its abundance is shared with the human gut microbiome despite the physicochemical differences between these two ecosystems.

Citations

• Eukaryotic plankton diversity in the sunlit ocean
• Competition–dispersal tradeoff ecologically differentiates recently speciated marine bacterioplankton populations
• The SILVA ribosomal RNA gene database project: improved data processing and web-based tools
• Microbial oceanography of the dark ocean's pelagic realm
• Conservation evaluation and phylogenetic diversity
• Open science resources for the discovery and analysis of Tara Oceans data

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• A major lineage of non-tailed dsDNA viruses as unrecognized killers of marine bacteria
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• Dating Alphaproteobacteria evolution with eukaryotic fossils
• Global distribution patterns of marine nitrogen-fixers by imaging and molecular methods
• The microbial nitrogen-cycling network
• Marine microorganisms [wikipedia]