Journal article
Spatially extensive microbial biogeography of the Indian Ocean provides insights into the unique community structure of a pristine coral atoll
TC Jeffries, M Ostrowski, RB Williams, C Xie, RM Jensen, JJ Grzymski, SJ Senstius, M Givskov, R Hoeke, GK Philip, RY Neches, DI Drautz-Moses, C Chenard, IT Paulsen, FM Lauro
Scientific Reports | Published : 2015
DOI: 10.1038/srep15383
Abstract
Microorganisms act both as drivers and indicators of perturbations in the marine environment. In an effort to establish baselines to predict the response of marine habitats to environmental change, here we report a broad survey of microbial diversity across the Indian Ocean, including the first microbial samples collected in the pristine lagoon of Salomon Islands, Chagos Archipelago. This was the first largescale ecogenomic survey aboard a private yacht employing a 'citizen oceanography' approach and tools and protocols easily adapted to ocean going sailboats. Our data highlighted biogeographic patterns in microbial community composition across the Indian Ocean. Samples from within the Salom..
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Awarded by Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
Funding Acknowledgements
We thank Dr. Aurore Trottet and Dr. Ole Larsen from DHI for the loan of the YSI sonde model 6600V2. We thank Iva Neveux, Chin Lui Wesley Goi and Krithika Arumugam for technical assistance and Dr. Patrick Martin for insightful discussions. We acknowledge the assistance of the staff at the British Indian Ocean Territory administration for granting us permission to sample the waters in the Chagos Archipelago. We gratefully acknowledge the many volunteers and scientists who sailed S/Y Indigo V during the Indian Ocean passage from Cape Town to Singapore: Trent Goldsack, Joshua (Jeff Goldblum) Goldstein, Ruth McCance, Raymond Pennotti, Mark V. Brown, Diane McDougald, Jay Cullen, Lilia Pitacco, Joseph Podvorec, Alain Talbot and Jasna Zarkovic. This study was financially supported by the School of BABS (University of New South Wales), the ithree and C3 Institutes (University of Technology Sydney), the Costerton Biofilm Center (University of Copenhagen), the Singapore Centre on Environmental Life Sciences Engineering (SCELSE), the Department of Chemistry and Biomolecular Sciences (Macquarie University) and the Desert Research Institute. The research at the Singapore Centre on Environmental Life Sciences Engineering (SCELSE) is supported by the National Research Foundation Singapore, Ministry of Education to Nanyang Technological University and National University of Singapore, under its Research Centre of Excellence Programme. RN was supported by an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation grant to Jonathan A. Eisen. FML was supported by a fellowship from the Australian Research Council (DE120102610).