Biology
Scientific paper
Dec 2005
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2005agufm.v44a..09s&link_type=abstract
American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2005, abstract #V44A-09
Biology
0406 Astrobiology And Extraterrestrial Materials, 0410 Biodiversity, 0444 Evolutionary Geobiology, 0456 Life In Extreme Environments, 0460 Marine Systems (4800)
Scientific paper
An estimated 3.6 x 1030 microbial cells with cellular carbon of ~3 x 1017 grams may account for more than 90 percent of the total oceanic biomass. The number of bacteriophage and viruses may be one hundred-fold higher. With such enormous populations, the accumulation of mutations should lead to very high levels of genetic diversity and phenotypic variation. Yet, traditional microbiological methods have described only 30,000 protists and fewer than 5000 kinds of prokaryotes. In recent years there have been spectacular revelations about marine microbial diversity, but we have explored only a small fraction of the total ocean; there have been no systematic efforts to inventory marine microbes on a global scale. The International Census of Marine Microbes (ICOMM) ( http://icomm.mbl.edu ) is a field project of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation's Census of Marine Life ( http://www.coml.org ). ICOMM's charter is to initiate a survey of microbial diversity thorough out the world's oceans including the pelagic realm and the deep benthos. Measurements of microbial diversity will rely upon high-throughput DNA sequencing technologies that will provide information about microbial population structures and genomic context of functional genes from environmental DNA libraries. The Hawaiian Seamount, Loihi illustrates the integrative nature of ICOMM's strategy for exploring marine microbial diversity.
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