Cassandra L. Ettinger edited Project_Description_Personnel_1_page__.md  over 8 years ago

Commit id: 396707e93b0071ed565e3efb2cde55ada7eb5468

deletions | additions      

       

Next generation sequencing technology is finally allowing us to grasp the true diversity of the microbial world that surrounds us. As a result, microbial ecologists are finding themselves in uncharted territory as they analyze large data sets full of "unclassified" organisms. It has become clear that there are (??) more microorganisms than previously thought. Our goal with this proposal is to increase the overall knowledge of the true diversity of microbial eukaryotes by identifying and culturing microeukaryotes from seagrass beds.  Seagrass beds are hotspots of diversity (cite macrobe studies), providing homes to many rare/endemic macroogramisms, as well as hotspots for biogeochemical cycling. (Is there any evidence that tropical rain forests have more microbial diversity than other locations? if so, could use as justification?? closet find so far is this  \cite{Fierer_2012} ??) Thus, they are excellent candidates for identifying unexplored microbial eukaryotic diversity. Microeukaryotes play a variety of important roles in coastal and marine ecosystems; they are primary producers, predators/prey, decomposers, involved in biogeochemical cycling, untapped sources of natural products, potential pathogens and symbionts. Previous work has identified ........... The proposed project would result in an increase in the number of marine microeukaryotic ribsomal RNA sequences in open online databases as well as increase the number of microeukaryotic cultures available to researchers around the world for characterization and experimentation. Addtionally, this project would expand our knowledge of the tree of life and help with current research investigating the topology of this tree. The project will also include a significant amount of outreach and interdisciplinary collaboration both at the local level (undergraduate researchers, high school students) and the global level (blogging, collaborators).