Plankton networks driving carbon export in the oligotrophic ocean

By L. Guidi, Samuel Chaffron, L. Bittner, D. Eveillard, A. Larhlimi, Simon Roux, Youssef Darzi, S. Audic, L. Berline, Jennifer R. Brum and 29 more. Nature, 2016

751 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The biological carbon pump is the process by which CO2 is transformed to organic carbon via photosynthesis, exported through sinking particles, and finally sequestered in the deep ocean. While the intensity of the pump correlates with plankton community composition, the underlying ecosystem structure driving the process remains largely uncharacterized. Here we use environmental and metagenomic data gathered during the Tara Oceans expedition to improve our understanding of carbon export in the oligotrophic ocean. We show that specific plankton communities, from the surface and deep chlorophyll maximum, correlate with carbon export at 150 m and highlight unexpected taxa such as Radiolaria and alveolate parasites, as well as Synechococcus and their phages, as lineages most strongly associated with carbon export in the subtropical, nutrient-depleted, oligotrophic ocean. Additionally, we show that the relative abundance of a few bacterial and viral genes can predict a significant fraction of the variability in carbon export in these regions.

Subfields: Ecology, Environmental Chemistry, Molecular Biology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4c44196efc4f641e125529f80e56c81f41918541

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Citations in the corpus

Scientists’ warning to humanity: microorganisms and climate change (2019, positive): “Marine viruses, bacteriovorous bacteria and eukaryotic grazers are also important components of microbial food webs; for example, marine viruses influence how effectively carbon is sequestered and deposited into the deep ocean 57 .”
mixOmics: An R package for ‘omics feature selection and multiple data integration (2017, methodology): “(2016), Table 3 and factomineR Husson et al. (2017)). However, very few methods propose feature selection, including sparse CCA (pma package Witten et al. (2013)), sparse PLS (spls package, Chung et al.”
How to make more out of community data? A conceptual framework and its implementation as models and software. (2017, background): “Here, much of the focus has been on inferring association networks from sequence count data (Steele et al. 2011; Weiss et al. 2016), and on asking how such association networks relate to environmental conditions or ecosystem processes (e.g. Guidi et al. 2016).”