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Flora VINCENT: Institut de biologie de l'ENS (IBENS), Department of Biology, École normale supérieure, CNRS, INSERM, Université PSL, Paris, France Department of Plant and Environmental Sciences, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel
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Chris BOWLER: Institut de biologie de l'ENS (IBENS), Département de biologie, École normale supérieure, CNRS, INSERM, Université PSL Fédération de Recherche Global Ocean Systems Ecology and Evolution, FR2022/Tara Oceans GOSEE, Paris
INTRODUCTION
The ocean represents the largest continuous ecosystem on Earth, and 98% of its biomass is made up of organisms that are invisible to the naked eye: marine micro-organisms, many of which make up "plankton". The aim of this article is to present the diversity of plankton, as revealed by the "Tara Oceans" project, and to detail the approach and methodologies adopted by this ambitious project. Based on some of the 40,000 samples collected in all the world's oceans during the expedition, the team mapped the biodiversity of a wide range of planktonic organisms and explored their interactions. This project is the largest marine science DNA sequencing effort to date. Molecular analyses revealed around 40 million genes, the vast majority of which were new, suggesting a much wider biodiversity of plankton than previously known. These data have provided the scientific community with unprecedented resources, including a catalog of several million new genes that have transformed the way the oceans are studied and climate change is assessed.
Field: metagenomics
Degree of technology diffusion: growth
Technologies involved: molecular technologies (molecular barcoding, metabarcoding, DNA sequencing, etc.).
Applications: marine biotechnologies
Main French players :
Competence centers: Global Ocean Systems Ecology and Evolution Research Federation
Contact: [email protected] ; [email protected]
Reproduced with the kind permission of the Académie d'agriculture de France :
Vincent F., Bowler C. 2019. Plankton: the new frontier revealed by the Tara Océan expedition, Notes Académiques de l'Académie d'agriculture de France/Academic Notes from the French Academy of Agriculture, 2019, 4, 1-16.
Rapporteurs: Brigitte Meunier, CNRS Research Director at the Laboratoire de Bioénergétique et Ingénierie des Protéines BIP2 and Christian Ferault, member of the French Academy of Agriculture.
The Ultimate Scientific and Technical Reference
KEYWORDS
metagenomics | biodiversity
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Study of plankton biodiversity
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