Censusing marine eukaryotic diversity in the twenty-first century
The ocean constitutes one of the vastest and richest biomes on our planet. Most recent estimations, all based on indirect approaches, suggest that there are millions of marine eukaryotic species. Moreover, a large majority of these are small (less than 1 mm), cryptic and still unknown to science. Ho...
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| Format: | Online |
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The Royal Society
2016
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| Online Access: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4971183/ |
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pubmed-49711832016-09-05 Censusing marine eukaryotic diversity in the twenty-first century Leray, Matthieu Knowlton, Nancy Articles The ocean constitutes one of the vastest and richest biomes on our planet. Most recent estimations, all based on indirect approaches, suggest that there are millions of marine eukaryotic species. Moreover, a large majority of these are small (less than 1 mm), cryptic and still unknown to science. However, this knowledge gap, caused by the lack of diagnostic morphological features in small organisms and the limited sampling of the global ocean, is currently being filled, thanks to new DNA-based approaches. The molecular technique of PCR amplification of homologous gene regions combined with high-throughput sequencing, routinely used to census unculturable prokaryotes, is now also being used to characterize whole communities of marine eukaryotes. Here, we review how this methodological advancement has helped to better quantify the magnitude and patterns of marine eukaryotic diversity, with an emphasis on taxonomic groups previously largely overlooked. We then discuss obstacles remaining to achieve a global understanding of marine eukaryotic diversity. In particular, we argue that 18S variable regions do not provide sufficient taxonomic resolution to census marine life, and suggest combining broad eukaryotic surveys targeting the 18S rRNA region with more taxon-focused analyses of hypervariable regions to improve our understanding of the diversity of species, the functional units of marine ecosystems. The Royal Society 2016-09-05 /pmc/articles/PMC4971183/ /pubmed/27481783 http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2015.0331 Text en © 2016 The Authors. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Published by the Royal Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits unrestricted use, provided the original author and source are credited. |
| repository_type |
Open Access Journal |
| institution_category |
Foreign Institution |
| institution |
US National Center for Biotechnology Information |
| building |
NCBI PubMed |
| collection |
Online Access |
| language |
English |
| format |
Online |
| author |
Leray, Matthieu Knowlton, Nancy |
| spellingShingle |
Leray, Matthieu Knowlton, Nancy Censusing marine eukaryotic diversity in the twenty-first century |
| author_facet |
Leray, Matthieu Knowlton, Nancy |
| author_sort |
Leray, Matthieu |
| title |
Censusing marine eukaryotic diversity in the twenty-first century |
| title_short |
Censusing marine eukaryotic diversity in the twenty-first century |
| title_full |
Censusing marine eukaryotic diversity in the twenty-first century |
| title_fullStr |
Censusing marine eukaryotic diversity in the twenty-first century |
| title_full_unstemmed |
Censusing marine eukaryotic diversity in the twenty-first century |
| title_sort |
censusing marine eukaryotic diversity in the twenty-first century |
| description |
The ocean constitutes one of the vastest and richest biomes on our planet. Most recent estimations, all based on indirect approaches, suggest that there are millions of marine eukaryotic species. Moreover, a large majority of these are small (less than 1 mm), cryptic and still unknown to science. However, this knowledge gap, caused by the lack of diagnostic morphological features in small organisms and the limited sampling of the global ocean, is currently being filled, thanks to new DNA-based approaches. The molecular technique of PCR amplification of homologous gene regions combined with high-throughput sequencing, routinely used to census unculturable prokaryotes, is now also being used to characterize whole communities of marine eukaryotes. Here, we review how this methodological advancement has helped to better quantify the magnitude and patterns of marine eukaryotic diversity, with an emphasis on taxonomic groups previously largely overlooked. We then discuss obstacles remaining to achieve a global understanding of marine eukaryotic diversity. In particular, we argue that 18S variable regions do not provide sufficient taxonomic resolution to census marine life, and suggest combining broad eukaryotic surveys targeting the 18S rRNA region with more taxon-focused analyses of hypervariable regions to improve our understanding of the diversity of species, the functional units of marine ecosystems. |
| publisher |
The Royal Society |
| publishDate |
2016 |
| url |
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4971183/ |
| _version_ |
1613620159182798848 |