Marine Microbial Eukaryote Transcriptome Sequencing Project (MMETSP)

Marine microbial eukaryotes comprise a vast array of single-celled, nucleated microbes, including diatoms, dinoflagellates, amoebae, ciliates and water molds. These organisms fill numerous ecological roles ranging from photosynthetic primary producers (base of aquatic food webs) to heterotrophic consumers of pre-formed organic compounds. Phytoplankton is responsible for generation of up to half of the world’s oxygen.

Despite their great abundance and importance, the gene content of oceanic microbial eukaryotes has not been studied extensively. Therefore one of the major goals of this G.B. Moore Foundation funded project is to generate a catalogue of expressed genes from 750 such microbes. So far 695 samples representing 421 unique strains have been approved for sequencing, assembly and annotation. Out of the 409 RNA/cDNA samples received so far, 362 TruSeq libraries have already been sequenced using Illumina Hi-Seq 2000 (2x50-nt paired-end sequences) and ready for de bruijn graph based assembly. Functional annotation is being carried out based on searches against the PFam, SUPERFAMILY and TIGRFAMs HMM libraries as well as the UniProtKB/Swiss-Prot protein database. Raw sequence reads, transcriptome assemblies, annotations and metadata for 97 data sets have been made available to the respective PIs through CAMERA (camera.calit2.net). The primary focus of this project is to increase the research community’s scientific knowledgebase and enable metagenomic analyses of complex marine communities. This will lead to a better understanding of the ecology and evolution of these highly diverse organisms. www.marinemicroeukaryotes.org