Seminar at UVigo: Aquatic microbial ecology through the lens of high-throughput DNA/RNA sequencing

Aquatic microbial ecology through the lens of high-throughput DNA/RNA sequencing

Who: Ramiro Logares (Institute of Marine Sciences (ICM), CSIC, Barcelona)
When: 23 Feb 2012 - 12:00
Where: Salón de Actos de la Facultad de Ciências (Universidad de Vigo)
Microbes play key roles in global ecosystem functioning and nutrient cycling. In the oceans and other aquatic environments, they may represent the most diverse organisms in terms of taxonomy and metabolism. Understanding diversity, spatiotemporal distributions, interactions and evolution of microbes are among the most important current challenges in ecology and evolutionary research. During the last 30 years, molecular tools have been used to investigate these topics. The last five years have been particularly exciting, as the arrival and increasing availability of high-throughput DNA/RNA sequencing revolutionized the field, bringing new opportunities and challenges. High-Throughput sequencers can generate massive amounts of information at relatively low costs, and today one single run can produce about 500 Gigabases of data.This power allows us to tackle questions that have been difficult to address with previous technologies. For example: What is the magnitude of total microbial diversity? What organisms inhabit the rare biosphere? To what extent environmental and/or neutral processes determine microbial metacommunity assembly? These new technologies also challenge our capability to analyze huge datasets, as well as our current computer power. In this presentation, I will introduce some high-throughput sequencing techniques that are popular in aquatic microbial ecology (focusing in oceans and lakes), discuss a number of questions that they allow to investigate and show a few case studies.

You can also follow it live on http://tv.campusdomar.es

Update: The lecture was recorded and can be seen here.