2014 AGU Fall Meeting

December 15 - 19, 2014

Marine microbes catalyze chemical transformations that are essential for maintaining ocean ecosystems. It is becoming increasingly clear that understanding activities and functional roles at the single-cell level is needed to evaluate their impact on marine biogeochemical cycles. Specific functional roles of individual cells may largely determine the element transformations in the oceans, with enormous biogeochemical implications in extremely different environmental conditions, from photic layers to the deep ocean, including deep-sea sediments. Furthermore, cell-to-cell interactions (e.g. symbiosis, parasitism) established between many different marine microorganisms are essential for the sustainability of the ecosystem and the cycling of many elements. The use of culture-independent methods such as high-throughput sequencing technologies (metagenomes, single cell genomics), fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH), nanoscale secondary ion mass spectrometry (NanoSIMS), or the recently proposed single-cell transcriptomic analysis has exponentially expanded our knowledge on the functional and biogeochemical roles of these microbial interactions, yet we are still far from truly understanding the ecological or evolutionary relevance of these kind of microbial partnerships. This session strongly encourages researchers to present methodological or empirical work devoted to gain insight into the single-cell analysis and the diversity and potential biogeochemical impact of interacting microorganisms.

• MM - Microbiology and Molecular Ecology
• NC - Nutrient Cycling