TREC (Traversing European Coastlines) expedition
An expedition to study coastal ecosystems and their response to the environment, from molecules to communities.
Starting in April 2023 until the end of June 2024, our group, in collaboration with the Sunagawa lab at ETH Zurich, will gather bioaerosols samples and environmental data along the European coastline at more than 120 land-sea transects to explore the diversity, function and dispersal of airborne microbial communities at the land-ocean interface. In selected sites, we will perform time-series measurements to account for daily changes.
Mission Microbiome and Gayoso Experiment
From December 2020 to September 2022 the Tara Oceans Foundation embarked on Mission Microbiome, sailing all along the South American coast, Antarctica and the West African coast. The expedition's goals are to better understand how does climate change disrupt ocean currents and the distribution of the marine microbiome, what impact does pollution and particularly microplastics have on the marine microbiome, and how does the land fertilise the ocean? We will contiuosuly sample marine aerosols physical, chemical, and biological properties.
Gayoso Experiment: A holistic study of coccolithophore bloom dynamics.
Every austral spring, the Patagonian shelf and shelf-break experience massive phytoplankton blooms. Within Mission microbiome, we embarked on the continuation of the coccolithophore 'hunt' we did in the N. Atlantic in May 2019. In December 2021, in a joint effort with Argentinian scientists, we did a 10 day "lagrangian drift" (using satellite data and following SVP drifters) of the Patagonian shelf to follow the dynamics of a coccolithophore bloom. We deployed flow cytometry measurements, protocols for meta-omics (meta-B/G/T), extracellular vesicles, single-cell transcriptomics, the meta-proteome and meta-metabolome, as well as aerosol and sea surface microlayer measurements, a suite of specific methods targeting lipid- and gene-based molecular biomarkers of coccolithophores and their viruses, and continuous in-situ measurements of bio-optical properties of the surface water.
Cocolitophore bloom in the N. Atlantic Ocean
Continuing with our collaboration with Tara Ocean Foundation, in May 2019 we embark on a two-week ‘hunt’ for an Emiliania huxleyi bloom in the N Atlantic Ocean. A natural extension from our Mesocosm Experiment, we plan to take a holistic approach to untangle the complexity of alga-virus-bacteria interactions during an E. huxleyi bloom, off the coast of Brittany, France. A wide suite of sampling protocols were applied, including single-cell sorting, single-cell RNA-seq, 16S and 18S sequencing for microbiome diversity, vesicles, electron microscopy, metabolomics and lipidomics.
Tara Pacific Expedition
In May 2016, the Tara Oceans Foundation embarked on its 11th expedition, the Tara Pacific Expedition, a 2.5-year research project aimed to understand coral reef holobiont and its associated surface plankton ecosystem and to assess inter-island and open ocean surface plankton community structures. We installed instrumentation for continuous online aerosol measurement, wide angle time-lapse cameras, and home-built filter collectors for biological, chemical and morphological analysis of the marine aerosols.
White rainbow captured off the Patagonian shelf.