Award: OCE-1046368

In this project we focused on the developments of molecular techniques for analyzing the genetic composition of microbial cells reside at different parts of the ocean, ranging from surface water to deep sea bed. To understand the composition and diversity of microbes, which are always heterogeneous and often difficult to grown in the lab, we specifically focused on novel approaches, one capturing individual mcirobial cells and read out their near complete genome information, and the second one rapidly reading out fragmented genetic materials from millions of cells. For the first method, we designed and engineering soft plastic slides that contains thousands of microwells each hold nanoliter of liquid to capture single cells and amplify the genetic materials for DNA sequencing. For the second approach, we directly broke down up to a million cells from sea water samples, and used an "in vitro transposition" mechanism to efficiently convert small amounts of genetic materials in the formation compatible to DNA sequencers. We applied these techniques to various sea water samples from California harbors, Sargasso Sea to Atlantic Ridge deep subsurface, and demonstrated that we were able to recover the full diversity of the microbial populations, due to the sensitive and unbiased nature of our methods. Last Modified: 03/25/2016 Submitted by: Kun Zhang