Exploring the ocean multiverse with Tara Oceans
Speakers:
Romain Troublé, Executive Director of the Tara Ocean Foundation
Dr. Chris Bowler, Director of Research at CNRS, Director of the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Section of the Institut de Biologie de l’Ecole Normale Supérieure
Dr. Matthew B. Sullivan, Professor of microbiology and Director of the Center of Microbiome Science at Ohio State University
Overview from Carnegie Science:
The ocean is the Earth's largest ecosystem, but we know very little about it. This is particularly true for plankton, even though they form the base of marine food webs and are key players in Earth’s biogeochemical cycles. Ocean plankton are at least as important for the Earth system as the forests on land, but most of them are invisible to the naked eye and thus are largely uncharacterized. To increase our understanding of this underexplored world, a multidisciplinary consortium, Tara Oceans, was formed around the research sailboat Tara, which sampled plankton in all the major oceanic regions during expeditions between 2009 and 2013.
This program will summarize the Tara Ocean project's efforts to the largest DNA sequencing effort for the oceans. It provides unique resources for several scientific disciplines that are foundational for mapping ocean biodiversity of a wide range of organisms that are rarely studied together, exploring their interactions, and integrating biology into our physical and chemical understanding of the ocean. The project's efforts are also vital to identifying new organisms and genes of biotechnological interest. Tara Ocean's resources are critical for developing baseline information for tracking the impact of climate change on the ocean.
To learn more about speakers visit:
https://carnegiescience.edu/exploring-ocean-multiverse-tara-oceans
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