Microbial eukaryotes (organisms <1mm, such as nematodes, fungi, protists, and other ‘minor’ metazoan phyla) are abundant and ubiquitous in marine sediments, performing key functions such as nutrient cycling and sediment stability in marine habitats. Yet, their unexplored diversity represents one of the major challenges in biology and currently limits our capacity to understand, mitigate and remediate the consequences of environmental change. Sparse eukaryotic databases and incomplete phylogenies currently impose significant limitations on the depth of information that can be garnered from environmental -Omics approaches of mixed communities (e.g. metagenomic and rRNA marker gene studies) and comparative phylogenomic studies. This seminar will discuss recent work using parallel high- throughput sequencing and taxonomic approaches to explore broad patterns in microbial eukaryote assemblages (biodiversity and phylogeography, functional roles for microbial taxa, and the relationship between species and environmental parameters), with an emphasis on free-living nematodes in marine sediments.

Prof. Holly Bik