Pei-Yuan Qian

Pei-Yuan's plenary title is: Holobionts and hologenomes in deep-sea chemosynthetic ecosystems

The discovery of deep-sea vent and cold seep chemosynthetic ecosystems over 40 years ago marked the beginning of a new era in deep-sea biology research. In these chemosynthetic ecosystems, symbiotic bacteria and host (invertebrates) form unique ecological and evolutionary units, called “holobionts”. Since it remains extremely challenging for us to isolate and cultivate microbial endosymbionts, analysis of omic (genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, and metabolomes) has been used to decipher interaction among microbes and animals, reconstruct microbial consortia and metabolic pathways involved in resource acquirement and partition, and reveal the possible molecular mechanisms for symbiosis establishment and maintenance. It became clear that different holobionts from the same ecosystem may harbor different endosymbionts and different individuals of the same species can contain different strains of the same endosymbiont species, it is important to know how microbe-animal partnership specificity affects adaptation at the molecular level. In this presentation, I will highlight some of our recent findings in several deep-sea hologenome studies, aiming to illustrate nutritional interdependencies of the host and symbiont, including cooperation and complementarity, the metabolic versatility of some symbionts, and differentiation of the holobiont condition in response to the environment.