Seminar by Ramunas Stepanauskas
Monday (October 30th) Ramunas Stepanauskas will be in town and has offered to give a talk at 3pm, in the Kommunehospital, building 22, auditorium. Ramunas directs the single cell genomics facility at the Bigelow labs in the US, which is a very state of the art facility he and his team have built. And he’s using the methods they have developed to do a range of things, from studying eDNA at the single cell level (as in shed vertebrate cells) to characterizing the microflora of our oceans.
The title and abstract for Ramunas talk is below. Also as he is here all day, if anyone would like a chat with him, let me know. Feel free to disseminate the information to any one you think who might be interested in the technology and topics.
Title: Genomes and phenomes of individual cells in the ocean
By Ramunas Stepanauskas, Bigelow Laboratories, USA
Abstract: In this presentation I will review recent work performed by my group on the genome and phenome analyses of individual cells and extracellular genetic elements in the ocean, where unicellular microorganisms dominate ecosystem’s processes, biomass and biodiversity. In one example, a large-scale, randomized sequencing of genomes of thousands of individual prokaryoplankton cells from a global set of field samples is being utilized to analyze a wide range of marine microbiology’s questions. Those include the global coding potential and pangenome composition of prokaryoplankton lineages, the impact and rates of horizontal gene exchange, the frequency and types of infecting agents, and other phenomena. In another example, we are using fluorescent probing techniques for the measurement of oxygen respiration, polysaccharide uptake and secondary metabolite biosynthesis in the same, uncultured cells that are subject to genomic sequencing. In a third example, we have been developing novel methods for whole genome analyses of individual cells of fish and other vertebrates in the water column, which may improve and cut the cost of the monitoring of endangered and commercially important species. Together, these examples showcase new insights and opportunities offered by studies of individual cells and extracellular biological entities in their natural environment at ecologically relevant scales.