The scooping pond water and instantly knowing every fish, frog, insect, algae, and microbe living there. Metabarcoding makes this possible by reading environmental DNA (eDNA) from a single sample.It includes the following steps, Collect water, soil, or air. Extract...
Over the past days, my posts have explored different ways ecologists study life: traits, long-term ecological research, meta-analyses, and imaging methods. Each one showed me a different angle on biodiversity. Now, I want to introduce metabarcoding which adds a...
Before today’s class I always had it in mind that the only beneficial organisms in the ocean are the bigger animals. Never have I thought that tiny microbes in the ocean actually carry such a role in carbon fixation. The interactions between microbes and...
Marine microbes are central to the ocean’s role in regulating Earth’s carbon balance. Through the lens of ecological physiology, we can examine how these organisms respond to environmental conditions while driving essential biochemical processes. From sunlit surface...
The journey of carbon in the ocean begins with phytoplankton, which capture carbon dioxide and convert it into organic matter such as glycans. These glycans then become a key link in the system, transferring carbon to microbial communities. Microbes process this...
