Welcome to the world of ‘the unseen majority’ of the ocean! A drop of seawater contains billions of cells from the three domains of life: bacteria, archaea, and eukarya, as well as viruses. This is the marine microbiome. Come meet those microbes, and you will learn that they are our essential allies in the fight against climate change.
The lectures will cover the key microbial groups in the ocean, lessons learned from their fossil records, current status in the oceans, and forecasts regarding this acclimation to the future ocean conditions. We will discuss the metabolic process occurring inside those cells, or between interacting microbes, and how they impact over vast scales of space and time.
There are no prerequisites for the course. This is a basic level course in marine microbiology- it can benefit life science and chemistry students, MSc and PhD level, providing them with a strong background in marine microbiology, which could also assist them in many other fields of study.
The lectures:
1) Marine microbes and the carbon cycle (A guest lecture by Dr. Yinon Bar-On)
2) How did life evolve in the oceans?
3) How do marine microbes influence seawater composition?
4) Why do marine phytoplankton calcify?
5) How and why do microbes create their own light?
6) How do bacteria survive in seawater?
7) What is the most abundant microbe in the ocean, and why?
8) What are the anthropogenic threats posed to marine microbes? Can we protect them?
9) Microbes at the air-sea interface (A guest lecture by Dr. Michel Flores)
10-13) Journal clubs