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. 2015 May 22;348(6237):1261359.
doi: 10.1126/science.1261359.

Ocean plankton. Structure and function of the global ocean microbiome

Shinichi Sunagawa  1 , Luis Pedro Coelho  2 , Samuel Chaffron  3 , Jens Roat Kultima  2 , Karine Labadie  4 , Guillem Salazar  5 , Bardya Djahanschiri  2 , Georg Zeller  2 , Daniel R Mende  2 , Adriana Alberti  4 , Francisco M Cornejo-Castillo  5 , Paul I Costea  2 , Corinne Cruaud  4 , Francesco d'Ovidio  6 , Stefan Engelen  4 , Isabel Ferrera  5 , Josep M Gasol  5 , Lionel Guidi  7 , Falk Hildebrand  2 , Florian Kokoszka  8 , Cyrille Lepoivre  9 , Gipsi Lima-Mendez  3 , Julie Poulain  4 , Bonnie T Poulos  10 , Marta Royo-Llonch  5 , Hugo Sarmento  11 , Sara Vieira-Silva  3 , Céline Dimier  12 , Marc Picheral  7 , Sarah Searson  7 , Stefanie Kandels-Lewis  13 ; Tara Oceans coordinators; Chris Bowler  14 , Colomban de Vargas  15 , Gabriel Gorsky  7 , Nigel Grimsley  16 , Pascal Hingamp  9 , Daniele Iudicone  17 , Olivier Jaillon  18 , Fabrice Not  15 , Hiroyuki Ogata  19 , Stephane Pesant  20 , Sabrina Speich  21 , Lars Stemmann  7 , Matthew B Sullivan  10 , Jean Weissenbach  18 , Patrick Wincker  18 , Eric Karsenti  22 , Jeroen Raes  23 , Silvia G Acinas  24 , Peer Bork  25
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Free article

Ocean plankton. Structure and function of the global ocean microbiome

Shinichi Sunagawa et al. Science. .
Free article

Abstract

Microbes are dominant drivers of biogeochemical processes, yet drawing a global picture of functional diversity, microbial community structure, and their ecological determinants remains a grand challenge. We analyzed 7.2 terabases of metagenomic data from 243 Tara Oceans samples from 68 locations in epipelagic and mesopelagic waters across the globe to generate an ocean microbial reference gene catalog with >40 million nonredundant, mostly novel sequences from viruses, prokaryotes, and picoeukaryotes. Using 139 prokaryote-enriched samples, containing >35,000 species, we show vertical stratification with epipelagic community composition mostly driven by temperature rather than other environmental factors or geography. We identify ocean microbial core functionality and reveal that >73% of its abundance is shared with the human gut microbiome despite the physicochemical differences between these two ecosystems.

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