There are more microbes in a bucket of seawater than there are people on Earth. Despite their abundance, humans are only just beginning to fathom the complex role marine microbes play in the ocean ecosystem.
These tiny creatures are responsible for the chemical reactions that drive Earth's marine biogeochemical cycles, yet, in terms of how and why groups of microbes interact and what the functional consequences are of those interactions, they are still considered "black boxes." An understanding of them is critical for assessing the ocean's health and productivity.
Three projects at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, which received a total of $5.2 million in 2012 from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation's Marine Microbiology Initiative, will employ scientific inquiry and the latest technology and laboratory techniques to shed light on microbes. Their work will look for answers to questions regarding the flow of nutrients through microbial food webswho eats and secretes what, where, and whenand the resulting biogeochemical transformations.
"The support of the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation is critical to enabling a fundamental understanding of microbes' contribution to ocean health and productivity," says WHOI President and Director Susan Avery. "There is so much more to know about marine microbes' genetic diversity, how they secure nutrients, what other organisms they interact with, and the biogeochemical changes they bring about in the ocean. These new projects will contribute toward the ultimate goal of a comprehensive understanding of marine microbial communities."
For the last few decades, oceanographers have been thinking about microbes simply as components of the marine food web: they take up nutrients and are prey for larger organisms, and their abundance and diversity in the ocean depends only on the amounts and types of nutrients and predators in their environment. This view is overly simplistic, and the
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