Lucas Paoli

Lucas' keynote title is: Mining the functional potential of the global ocean microbiome

The global ocean is home to a phylogenetically and metabolically diverse microbiome. In addition to underexplored organismal groups, this diversity encompasses a rich discovery potential for ecologically and biotechnologically relevant enzymes, peptides and biochemical compounds. However, studying the genomic pathways underpinning this functional diversity and assigning them to their respective hosts remains challenging, owing to cultivation biases and limitations in genome-resolved data at the global scale. As such, the functional and biosynthetic potential of microorganisms in the open ocean remains largely underexplored. To map this potential, we integrated around 10,000 microbial genomes from cultivated and single cells with more than 25,000 newly reconstructed draft genomes from over 1,000 publicly available seawater metagenomes to generate the Ocean Microbiomics Database (OMD). Mining this database revealed approximately 40,000 putative mostly new biosynthetic gene clusters, several of which were found in previously unsuspected phylogenetic groups. From these, we characterized multiple biosynthetic pathways and revealed cases of unusual bioactive compound structure and enzymology. By integrating additional publicly available data, we recently scaled up these efforts to increase the size of the OMD by ten folds, both in the number of samples and reconstructed genomes. Together, this research demonstrates how data-driven strategies can enable the investigation of previously undescribed pathways in underexplored microbial groups, while also showing that much of marine microbial functional diversity has yet to be characterized. In order to foster the exploration of this diversity, the OMD is freely available at https://microbiomics.io/ocean as a resource for the research community.