PRE2023-Metabolic interactions in the ocean microbiome MAORI (PID2022-136281NB-I00)

The MAORI project (PID2022-136281NB-I00) aims to fill a significant knowledge gap in understanding microbial interactions in the ocean, which are crucial for the functioning of this ecosystem and form the base of food webs. Utilizing state-of-the-art molecular and computational techniques, large omics datasets, and innovative experiments, MAORI seeks to advance our understanding of metabolic interactions among ocean microbes. The project will leverage extensive omics datasets, including samples from the LTER Blanes Bay Microbial Observatory in Spain and the SOLA marine station in France, as well as global oceanographic campaigns like MALASPINA and TARA Oceans. Cutting-edge methods such as PacBio long-read DNA sequencing, new metabolic modeling approaches, and Empirical Dynamic Modeling (EDM) will be employed. MAORI has four main objectives: - Spatiotemporal Analysis: To study how community-level metabolic interaction networks in the ocean change across space and time. - Causality Determination: To use EDM to identify the strength and influence of potential interactions among marine microbes over time. - Cooperation and Competition: To investigate these aspects among co-occurring ocean microbes using species-level metabolic models that predict metabolite exchange and cross-feeding. - Experimental Validation: To validate predicted metabolic interactions through experiments involving co-culturing, measurement of extracellular metabolites and gene expression.