Biodiversity and Biogeography

Microbial cells occupy all marine habitats. In surface oceans, microbial eukaryotes and prokaryotes are at the orders of thousands and millions of cells per milliliter, respectively, but until the last two decades little was known about the taxonomic composition of these microbial assemblages. The use of molecular tools is now allowing us to address the magnitude of microbial diversity and its spatio-temporal distributions. In the EMM Research group, we investigate microbial populations and communities along wide spatial, environmental and temporal gradients, in order to find out the main drivers that determine community structuring patterns at regional and global scales.