Gene Expression Changes and Community Turnover Differentially Shape the Global Ocean Metatranscriptome
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Date
2019-11-14
Publication Type
Journal Article
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yes
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Abstract
Ocean microbial communities strongly influence the biogeochemistry, food webs, and climate of our planet. Despite recent advances in understanding their taxonomic and genomic compositions, little is known about how their transcriptomes vary globally. Here, we present a dataset of 187 metatranscriptomes and 370 metagenomes from 126 globally distributed sampling stations and establish a resource of 47 million genes to study community-level transcriptomes across depth layers from pole-to-pole. We examine gene expression changes and community turnover as the underlying mechanisms shaping community transcriptomes along these axes of environmental variation and show how their individual contributions differ for multiple biogeochemically relevant processes. Furthermore, we find the relative contribution of gene expression changes to be significantly lower in polar than in non-polar waters and hypothesize that in polar regions, alterations in community activity in response to ocean warming will be driven more strongly by changes in organismal composition than by gene regulatory mechanisms.
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published
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Journal / series
Volume
179 (5)
Pages / Article No.
1068 - 1.083e+24
Publisher
Cell Press
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Edition / version
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Date collected
Date created
Subject
Tara Oceans; global ocean microbiome; metatranscriptome; metagenome; microbial ecology; gene expression change; community turnover; biogeochemistry; eco-systems biology; ocean warming
Organisational unit
09583 - Sunagawa, Shinichi / Sunagawa, Shinichi
Notes
Funding
184955 - Resolving ocean microbial micro-diversity and its environmental drivers at global scale (SNF)