ORAL - Amaral-Zettler

The International Census of Marine Microbes (ICoMM), an ocean realm project of the Census of Marine Life Program (CoML) seeks to determine what is known, what is unknown but knowable, and what may never be known about the biodiversity of microorganisms in the world’s ocean. ICoMM is a joint venture between The Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research (NIOZ) and the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) in Woods Hole. The ICoMM Secretariat at Woods Hole hosts the website http://icomm.mbl.edu and the distributed database network MICROBIS. It has sponsored meetings for four primary working groups (Benthic, Open Ocean and Coastal Systems, Technology, and Informatics and Data Management) and its Scientific Advisory Council. Through a series of workshops that engage the international community of marine microbiologists, ICoMM is forging a large-scale strategic plan to characterize microbial diversity in the sea through molecular approaches (high-throughput ribosomal tag pyrosequencing, genomics, lipidomics, etc.) and capture of existing legacy data (morphological etc.), and build a cyberinfrastructure to index and organize the emerging body of information. The community of microbial oceanographers represented within ICoMM (>100 and growing) recognizes the enormity of the task at hand both in terms of total volume of the oceans (estimated to be 1-4 X 1018 m3) and marine sediments with a potential population of more than 1030 microbial cells. Although a complete census is most likely beyond our grasp, the scientific return will be considerable if the information is integrated with contextual information that can inform us about the interplay between microbial mediated activities and oceanic processes.

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