Bridging the gap between omics and earth system science to better understand how environmental change impacts marine microbes

Mock, Thomas ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9604-0362, Daines, Stuart, Geider, Richard, Collins, Sinead, Metoviev, Metovi, Millar, Andrew J, Moulton, Vincent ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9371-6435 and Lenton, Timothy (2016) Bridging the gap between omics and earth system science to better understand how environmental change impacts marine microbes. Global Change Biology, 22 (1). pp. 61-75. ISSN 1354-1013

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Abstract

The advent of genomic-, transcriptomic- and proteomic-based approaches has revolutionized our ability to describe marine microbial communities, including biogeography, metabolic potential and diversity, mechanisms of adaptation, and phylogeny and evolutionary history. New interdisciplinary approaches are needed to move from this descriptive level to improved quantitative, process-level understanding of the roles of marine microbes in biogeochemical cycles and of the impact of environmental change on the marine microbial ecosystem. Linking studies at levels from the genome to the organism, to ecological strategies and organism and ecosystem response, requires new modelling approaches. Key to this will be a fundamental shift in modelling scale that represents micro-organisms from the level of their macromolecular components. This will enable contact with omics data sets and allow acclimation and adaptive response at the phenotype level (i.e. traits) to be simulated as a combination of fitness maximization and evolutionary constraints. This way forward will build on ecological approaches that identify key organism traits and systems biology approaches that integrate traditional physiological measurements with new insights from omics. It will rely on developing an improved understanding of ecophysiology to understand quantitatively environmental controls on microbial growth strategies. It will also incorporate results from experimental evolution studies in the representation of adaptation. The resulting ecosystem-level models can then evaluate our level of understanding of controls on ecosystem structure and function, highlight major gaps in understanding and help prioritize areas for future research programs. Ultimately, this grand synthesis should improve predictive capability of the ecosystem response to multiple environmental drivers.

Item Type: Article
Additional Information: © 2015 The Authors. Global Change Biology Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Uncontrolled Keywords: sdg 14 - life below water ,/dk/atira/pure/sustainabledevelopmentgoals/life_below_water
Faculty \ School: Faculty of Science > School of Environmental Sciences
Faculty of Science > School of Computing Sciences
UEA Research Groups: Faculty of Science > Research Centres > Centre for Ecology, Evolution and Conservation
Faculty of Science > Research Groups > Environmental Biology
Faculty of Science > Research Groups > Resources, Sustainability and Governance (former - to 2018)
Faculty of Science > Research Groups > Marine and Atmospheric Sciences (former - to 2017)
Faculty of Science > Research Groups > Computational Biology > Computational biology of RNA (former - to 2018)
Faculty of Science > Research Groups > Computational Biology > Phylogenetics (former - to 2018)
Faculty of Science > Research Groups > Computational Biology
Faculty of Science > Research Groups > Centre for Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences
Faculty of Science > Research Groups > Norwich Epidemiology Centre
Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences > Research Groups > Norwich Epidemiology Centre
Depositing User: Pure Connector
Date Deposited: 02 Feb 2016 13:11
Last Modified: 14 Jun 2023 12:26
URI: https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/56927
DOI: 10.1111/gcb.12983

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