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Threats to global biodiversity are increasingly recognised by scientists and the public as a critical challenge. Molecular sequencing technologies offer means to catalogue, explore, and monitor the richness and biogeography of life on Earth. However, exploiting their full potential requires tools that connect biodiversity infrastructures and resources. As a research infrastructure developing services and technical solutions that help integrate and coordinate life science resources across Europe, ELIXIR is a key player. To identify opportunities, highlight priorities, and aid strategic thinking, here we survey approaches by which molecular technologies help inform understanding of biodiversity. We detail example use cases to highlight how DNA sequencing is: resolving taxonomic issues; Increasing knowledge of marine biodiversity; helping understand how agriculture and biodiversity are critically linked; and playing an essential role in ecological studies. Together with examples of national biodiversity programmes, the use cases show where progress is being made but also highlight common challenges and opportunities for future enhancement of underlying technologies and services that connect molecular and wider biodiversity domains. Based on emerging themes, we propose key recommendations to guide future funding for biodiversity research: biodiversity and bioinformatic infrastructures need to collaborate closely and strategically; taxonomic efforts need to be aligned and harmonised across domains; metadata needs to be standardised and common data management approaches widely adopted; current approaches need to be scaled up dramatically to address the anticipated explosion of molecular data; bioinformatics support for biodiversity research needs to be enabled and sustained; training for end users of biodiversity research infrastructures needs to be prioritised; and community initiatives need to be proactive and focused on enabling solutions. For sequencing data to deliver their full potential they must be connected to knowledge: together, molecular sequence data collection initiatives and biodiversity research infrastructures can advance global efforts to prevent further decline of Earth's biodiversity.

The total microbiome functionality of bacteria was recently predicted to be 35.5 ±0.2 million of KEGG functions. Logically, due to the limitation in space and resource availability of the local community, local functionality will only comprise a small subset of the total functionality but the relationship between taxonomy and functionality is still uncertain. Here, I used a meta-analysis of 139 extant Tara ocean seawater samples from 68 locations across to globe with information on prokaryotic taxonomy on species level from 16S metabarcoding and functionality of prokaryotes on eggNOG gene family level from metagenomes to unveil the relationship between taxonomy and functionality, and to predict the global distribution of functionality. Functional richness showed a statistically significant increase with increasing species richness (P <0.0001, R2 =0.64) and increasing species diversity (P <0.0001, R2 =0.26) while functional diversity was similar across the different waters, ranging from 2.96 to 3.22. Globally, the highest functional richness was found in the Northern Pacific Ocean and in the North Atlantic Ocean, and decreased at extreme latitudes. Taken together, I unveil the relationship between taxonomy and functionality, and predict the global distribution of functional richness in prokaryotes inhabiting aquatic ecosystems, implying more pronounced effects in terrestrial ecosystems due to larger differences in environmental parameters especially for functional diversity.

Microbial communities in the world ocean are affected strongly by oceanic circulation, creating characteristic marine biomes. The high connectivity of most of the ocean makes it difficult to disentangle selective retention of colonizing genotypes (with traits suited to biome specific conditions) from evolutionary selection, which would act on founder genotypes over time. The Arctic Ocean is exceptional with limited exchange with other oceans and ice covered since the last ice age. To test whether Arctic microalgal lineages evolved apart from algae in the global ocean, we sequenced four lineages of microalgae isolated from Arctic waters and sea ice. Here we show convergent evolution and highlight geographically limited HGT as an ecological adaptive force in the form of PFAM complements and horizontal acquisition of key adaptive genes. Notably, ice-binding proteins were acquired and horizontally transferred among Arctic strains. A comparison with Tara Oceans metagenomes and metatranscriptomes confirmed mostly Arctic distributions of these IBPs. The phylogeny of Arctic-specific genes indicated that these events were independent of bacterial-sourced HGTs in Antarctic Southern Ocean microalgae. International audience

Accompanying material, text, data and figures for the article de Vargas et al., 'Eukaryotic plankton diversity in the sunlit ocean', Science 348, 1261605 (2015), doi: 10.1126/science.1261605

Spores of the dinoflagellate Chytriodinium are known to infest copepod eggs causing their lethality. Despite the potential to control the population of such an ecologically important host, knowledge about Chytriodinium parasites is limited: we know little about phylogeny, parasitism, abundance, or geographical distribution. We carried out genome sequence surveys on four manually isolated sporocytes from the same sporangium, which seemed to be attached to a copepod nauplius, to analyze the phylogenetic position of Chytriodinium based on SSU and concatenated SSU/LSU rRNA gene sequences, and also characterize two genes related to the plastidial heme pathway, hemL and hemY. The results suggest the presence of a cryptic plastid in Chytriodinium and a photosynthetic ancestral state of the parasitic Chytriodinium/Dissodinium clade. Finally, by mapping Tara Oceans V9 SSU amplicon data to the recovered SSU rRNA gene sequences from the sporocytes, we show that globally, Chytriodinium parasites are most abundant within the pico/nano‐ and mesoplankton of the surface ocean and almost absent within microplankton, a distribution indicating that they generally exist either as free‐living spores or host‐associated sporangia This work was supported by a grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation (GBMF3307) to P.J.K., T.A.R., A.Z.W., and A.E.S., and from NSERC (RGPIN‐2014–03994) to P.J.K. Ship time was supported by a grant from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation through MBARI and GBMF3788 to A.Z.W. J.dC. was supported by a Marie Curie International Outgoing Fellowship grant (FP7‐PEOPLE‐2012‐IOF-331450 CAARL), and N.O., M.K., and J.dC. were supported by a grant from the Tula Foundation to the Centre for Microbial Biodiversity and Evolution at UBC 8 pages, 3 figures, supporting information https://doi.org/10.1111/jeu.12701 Peer Reviewed

We thank the following people and sponsors for their commitment: CNRS (in particular, the GDR3280); EMBL; Genoscope/CEA; UPMC; VIB; Stazione Zoologica Anton Dohrn; UNIMIB; Rega Institute; KU Leuven; Fund for Scientific Research – The French Ministry of Research, the French Government “Investissements d’Avenir” programmes OCEANOMICS (ANR-11-BTBR-0008), FRANCE GENOMIQUE (ANR-10-INBS-09-08), and MEMO LIFE (ANR-10-LABX-54); PSL* Research University (ANR-11-IDEX-0001-02); ANR (projects POSEIDON/ANR-09-BLAN-0348, PROMETHEUS/ANR-09-PCSGENM-217, PHYTBACK/ANR-2010-1709-01, and TARA-GIRUS/ANR-09-PCS-GENM-218); EU FP7 (MicroB3/No.287589, IHMS/HEALTH-F4-2010-261376); European Research Council Advanced Grant Awards to C. Bowler (Diatomite:294823); Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation grant 3790 to M.B.S.; Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation grant CGL2011-26848/BOS MicroOcean PANGENOMICS and TANIT (CONES 2010-0036) grant from the Agency for Administration of University and Research Grants (AGAUR) to S.G.A.; and Japan Society for the Promotion of Science KAKENHI grant 26430184 to H.O. We also thank the following for their support and commitment: A. Bourgois, E. Bourgois, R. Troublé, Région Bretagne, G. Ricono, the Veolia Environment Foundation, Lorient Agglomération, World Courier, Illumina, the Electricité de France Foundation, Fondation pour la Recherche sur la Biodiversité, the Prince Albert II de Monaco Foundation, and the Tara schooner and its captains and crew. We thank MERCATORCORIOLIS and ACRI-ST for providing daily satellite data during the expedition. We are also grateful to the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs for supporting the expedition and to the countries who granted sampling permissions. Tara Oceans would not exist without continuous support from 23 institutes (http://oceans.taraexpeditions.org) Marine plankton support global biological and geochemical processes. Surveys of their biodiversity have hitherto been geographically restricted and have not accounted for the full range of plankton size. We assessed eukaryotic diversity from 334 size-fractionated photic-zone plankton communities collected across tropical and temperate oceans during the circumglobal Tara Oceans expedition. We analyzed 18S ribosomal DNA sequences across the intermediate plankton-size spectrum from the smallest unicellular eukaryotes (protists, >0.8 micrometers) to small animals of a few millimeters. Eukaryotic ribosomal diversity saturated at ∼150,000 operational taxonomic units, about one-third of which could not be assigned to known eukaryotic groups. Diversity emerged at all taxonomic levels, both within the groups comprising the ∼11,200 cataloged morphospecies of eukaryotic plankton and among twice as many other deep-branching lineages of unappreciated importance in plankton ecology studies. Most eukaryotic plankton biodiversity belonged to heterotrophic protistan groups, particularly those known to be parasites or symbiotic hosts. © 2015, American Association for the Advancement of Science. All rights reserved Vargas, Colomban de ... et. al.-- 11 pages, 7 figures, supplementary materials www.sciencemag.org/content/348/6237/1261605/suppl/DC1 Peer Reviewed