High-throughput sequencing based marine microbiome profiling is rapidly expanding and changing how we study the oceans. Although powerful, the technique is not fully quantitative – it only provides taxon counts in relative abundances. In order to address this issue, we presented a method to quantitatively estimate microbial abundances per unit volume of seawater filtered by spiking in known amounts of internal DNA standards to each sample. We validated this method by comparing the calculated abundances to other independent estimates including chemical markers (pigments) and total bacterial cell counts by flow cytometry. The internal standard approach allows us to quantitatively estimate and compare marine microbial community profiles, with important implications for linking environmental microbiomes to quantitative processes such as metabolic and biogeochemical rates.
Lab News
- PhD and postdoctoral positions available
- What it’s like to work in our lab through the lens of lab members Perrin Hagge and Katryna Niva.
- Comparing different measures of productivity in the ocean
- Multiscale variability of air-sea CO2 fluxes
- A glimpse into the life of a polar scientist as described by PhD student Perrin Hagge
- Global distribution of iron in the ocean
- Phytoplankton blooms triggered by Australian wildfires
- Decline in plankton diversity and carbon flux with reduced sea ice extent along the Western Antarctic Peninsula
- Biases in global air-sea gas transfer velocity of CO2 and other slightly soluble gases
- High resolution sampling and sensing of N2 fixation in the ocean
- New estimates of Global Marine Gross Primary Production
- Machine-learning estimates of global marine N2 fixation and diazotrophs
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