Wednesday, May 01, 2019 at 12:00pm to 1:00pm
Narragansett Bay Campus, Corless Auditorium (Watkins Building) 215 S Ferry Rd, Narragansett
Join us for a GSO Bio at Noon seminar by Dr. Harriet Alexander (WHOI), titled “Computational approaches for the study of marine protists.”
Abstract: Protists, or eukaryotic microbes, are key players in marine ecosystems, encompassing primary producers (phytoplankton), mixotrophs, and heterotrophs. Similar to their prokaryotic microbial counterparts (bacteria and archaea), many protists cannot be cultured, making the direct study of their biology in the lab challenging. Molecular and genomic approaches, particularly those applied to whole, mixed communities (e.g. metagenomics, metatranscriptomics), have shed light on the ecological roles, evolutionary histories, and physiological capabilities of these organisms. In this talk, I will present two vignettes related to the better characterization of microbial eukaryotic functional diversity in the natural system. First, I will present a metatranscriptomic approach that I developed to track shifts in strain diversity and phenotype in populations of the biogeochemically significant coccolithophore Emiliania huxleyi, the results of which suggest a major ecological importance for the “pan genome” of E. huxleyi. Second, I will share an on-going project in my lab focused on the development of a scalable and reproducible pipeline to facilitate the retrieval of eukaryotic metagenome assembled genomes (MAGs) from mixed metagenomes. We applied this pipeline to the protist-size fraction (0.8 – 2000 um) metagenomic datasets from the Tara, identifying over 100 novel eukaryotic MAGs.
Free
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