The project aims at the establishment of sustainable modern genomic and molecular techniques in the national marine partner institutes in order to support future ecosystem research initiatives.

Our part of MIMAS examines the diversity and function of marine bacterioplankton in a world of global climate change. By coupling the diversity to the metabolic potential the adaptation of marine bacteria to a changing environment will be explored.

First, a weekly sampling strategy will serve as a sample reservoir to monitor changes in diversity of the microbial community by fingerprinting and 16S rRNA gene clone libraries. The daily physical and chemical parameters provided by the “Biologische Anstalt Helgoland” BAH will set the stage upon the microbiological processes will be studied. The comparison of microbial diversity and composition with counts of the zooplankton and phytoplankton possible interactions of the different trophic levels within the microbial food chains will give insights into the complexity but also functionality of the biological processes present. At well defined time points several hundred liters of seawater samples will be fractionated by filtration into different cut-off sizes to specifically target large phytoplankton cells, picoplankton cells, but also ultra small virioplankton particles. Our part of the project will focus on the construction of metagenome libaries from the picoplankton fraction to explore the metabolic potential of the microbial community at well characterized time points. The results will be compared to the outcome of the other project partners from metaproteomics and metatranscriptomics.

• MIMAS is a BMBF joint project
• Responsibilities for TP3: Rudolf Amann & Bernhard Fuchs (MPI), and Gunnar Gerdts & Antje Wichels (AWI)