MIMOSA: Unlocking Marine Microbial Seedbank Dynamics. PID2025-176369NB-I00

Tue, 01 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Marine prokaryotic communities play central roles in oceans ecosystems functioning and in the oceans resilience to global change. These communities are extremely diverse in terms of taxonomy, metabolic capabilities and activities, and show a remarkable ability to persist from months to years when facing unfavorable conditions by becoming dormant (a reversible state of low metabolic activity). At any given time, a large fraction of the prokaryotic diversity in the environment is found in a dormant state, constituting the microbial seed bank. This seed bank represents a vast reservoir of metabolic potential, which underpins ecosystem resilience to disturbance. Dormancy is assumed to be mostly induced under unfavorable environmental conditions but work with clinical isolates suggests that there could be alternative mechanisms through which cells could become dormant, such as spontaneous switching or responsive switching upon interaction with viruses. However, these mechanisms have not been explored in marine systems, and represent the main goal of our project. MIMOSA aims to disentangle the complex dynamics of microbial seed banks by i) exploring the different mechanisms through which prokaryotes could become dormant in model marine bacteria, ii) investigating in situ short-term shifts in community function and transitions from and into the seed bank and iii) exploring what are the main factors driving these transitions. For this purpose, MIMOSA uses a multifaceted approach that combines experiments with marine isolates and high-frequency in situ observations, and the use of a broad suit of microbiological and molecular techniques, including single-cell approaches, proteomics, phenotypic assays, meta-transcriptomics and single cell genomics. The results will be contextualized with the 23 years of time series data collected at the Blanes Bay Microbial Observatory.

Microbial Seedbank | Ecology of Marine Microbes

MIMOSA: Unlocking Marine Microbial Seedbank Dynamics. PID2025-176369NB-I00