Resources and tools

At the Blanes Bay Microbial Observatory (BBMO) we study the microbial components of the marine ecosystem. We focus on the genomic, functional and species diversity of microbes, linking them to the cycling of carbon, sulfur and other elements in the marine plankton. BBMO is representative of an oligotrophic (relatively nutrient-poor) coastal ecosystem which is relatively unaffected by human and terrestrial influences. BBMO includes extensive information on the ecology of the Mediterranean marine plankton, with publications dating back to the 1950’s. Microbial data from the site goes back to 1992, and it has been sampled at monthy periodicity since March 2001.

MARBITS is the marine bioinformatics core service of the Department of Marine Biology and Oceanography at the Institut de Ciències del Mar (Marine Sciences Institute; ICM-CSIC), Barcelona. It has a total of 396 computing cores (CPUs; 792 with hyperthreading), 4.6 T of RAM and 1.5 Pb of shared storage.

Here we provide a tool to investigate the seasonality of picoeukaryotic taxa during a monthly survey of 10 years at the Blanes Bay Microbial Observatory (BBMO). This site is a coastal monitoring station located near the city of Blanes in the NW Mediterranean Sea (41°40′N, 2°48′E) with a focus on the abundance, diversity and activity of marine microorganisms. The diversity dataset derives from environmental V4-18S rDNA sequences (Giner et al. 2019), and can be queried via BLAST or by specifying the taxa of interest.

MicroMap is a web application that can be used to map global microbial abundance. It has a set of ASVs (Amplicon Sequence Variants) of 16S and 18S rDNA genes from microbial communities sampled during the Malaspina expedition. After a request, it will identify all ASVs matching the query and create a map displaying their relative abundance at the surface and along vertical profiles. Depending on the database you may perform queries using 16S/18S rDNA sequences, taxonomic classifications or sequence identifiers.