Tara Oceans: the data
Ready to explore the great unknown? 40 million previously undescribed genes and a raft of related sample data from the Tara Oceans expedition is freely available through EMBL-EBI.
Scientists from the Tara Oceans expedition have published a fleet of papers in a special issue of Science, offering a glimpse into the vast, uncharted biodiversity in the world’s oceans: 40 million genes, interactions between as-yet-unknown species, and profound insights into the effects of changing water temperatures – and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Data from these studies, together with those from Ocean Sampling Day 2013, are now freely available through the Pangea sample registry at the University of Bremen and the European Nucleotide Archive (ENA) and Metagenomics Portal at EMBL-EBI.
Tara researchers from EMBL, CNRS and many other institutes have compiled genetic material from around 35,000 marine plankton samples, which included viruses, microbes, algae, fish larvae and many other complex microscopic organisms.
Thanks to the project’s systematic approach, the data have been integrated with other marine-life datasets, such as those from Ocean Sampling Day, and can be explored through several public data resources.
“Sharing data from a project of this scale, with researchers from such diverse backgrounds, is not as straightforward as one might think,” explains Guy Cochrane, head of the European Nucleotide Archive. “The volume of original data is just outstanding – but to make it useful over the longer term, and by people working in different areas of science, like biotech, everyone had to agree on the best way to describe things and what kind of information to capture. That is a huge challenge when you are working in a new frontier like marine metagenomics.”
The project involved sequencing nearly a billion genetic barcodes to uncover a multitude of (mostly unknown) single-cell organisms, whose diversity rivals that of bacteria. Combined with other biodiversity data in these public data resources, the Tara datasets provide a genomic baseline for evaluating the impact of climate change on oceanic ecosystems.
“This is just the beginning,” says Chris Bowler from CNRS in France. “The resources we’ve generated will allow us and others to delve even deeper, and finally begin to really understand the workings of this invisible world.”
Source articles
Sunagawa, Coelho, Chaffron, et al. (2015) Structure and Function of the Global Ocean Microbiome. Science, Published online 21 May; DOI: 10.1126/science.1261359
de Vargas, Audic, Henry, et al. (2015) Eukaryotic plankton diversity in the sunlit global ocean. Science, Published online 21 May; DOI: 10.1126/science.1261605
Lima-Mendez, Faust, Henry et al. (2015) Determinants of community structure in the global plankton interactome. Science, Published online 21 May; DOI: 10.1126/science.1262073
Villar, Farrant, Follows et al. (2015) Environmental characteristics of Agulhas rings affect inter-ocean plankton transport. Science, Published online 21 May; DOI: 10.1126/science.1261447
Brum, Ignacio-Espinosa, Roux et al. (2015) Global patterns and ecological drivers of ocean viral communities. Science, Published online 21 May; DOI: 10.1126/science.1261498
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