GoMicrobes2

This cruise is part of an undergraduate immersion research course that will allow students to break away from the traditional class format and dive deeper into the world of microbial oceanography. Marine ecosystems are dominated by microscopic organisms that make up over two-thirds of ocean biomass and function as the major primary producers (phytoplankton) and consumers (bacteria). Our understanding of the marine microbial world has rapidly expanded with use of innovative molecular and chemical tools to uncover previously hidden taxonomic diversity, spatiotemporal distributions, and novel metabolic functions. Focusing on diversity and dynamics of phytoplankton and bacterial metabolisms, this interdisciplinary course provides a combination of laboratory, fieldwork, and data analyses to investigate marine microbes from the cellular to ecosystem scale. Undergraduate students will take part in a sampling expedition in coastal regions and use a variety of oceanographic equipment aboard a multi-day research cruise. Data types will span biogeochemistry (e.g., primary production, organic carbon, nutrients), marine microbe classification (e.g., microscopy, DNA sequencing), and metabolite identification (e.g., metabolomics). Follow-up wet bench cultivation techniques and data analysis will be carried out in the Durham Laboratory at UF.