Student Opportunity Announcements
Summer Course in Molecular Ecology of Phytoplankton
Molecular Ecology and Environmental Genomics of Marine Phytoplankton
Friday Harbor Laboratories (Summer 2012)
July 23 - August 24, 2012 (5 weeks)
Dr. Robin Kodner
Lead Faculty
Beam Reach Marine Science and Sustainability School
Seattle, WA 98115
Dr. Adrian Marchetti
Assistant Professor
Department of Marine Sciences
3202 Venable Hall, CB# 3300
University of North Carolina
Phytoplankton are the most genetically diverse group of organisms in the marine environment, and play a central role in coastal and open ocean ecosystems as primary producers. Equally important, these organisms play a fundamental role in the global carbon cycle. Because of these important roles, phytoplankton are crucial to understand changing oceans and ecosystems. In recent years a combination of molecular techniques and genomics has increased our ability to quantitatively describe the composition of phytoplankton communities and the functional interactions between phytoplankton and their environment. This course will provide an integrated foundation to understanding phytoplankton diversity, ecology, physiology, and biogeochemistry that will cover a range of traditional lab and field methods to the most modern high throughput sequencing technologies. An emphasis will be placed on integrating methods for application in the lab and the field.
This course will describe the broad diversity of phytoplankton groups from an evolutionary perspective and will explore various molecular and genomic-based tools for studying the diversity and physiology of these dynamic groups. Students will leave the course having explored the genome papers of all major phytoplankton groups, learned the history of molecular techniques in this field, and become familiar with bioinformatics techniques for comparative genomics and environmental genomics (metagenomics). From the bioinformatics and comparative genomics methods, the students will learn to form hypothesis in silico from existing sequence data, and then test these hypotheses in the lab or in the field using a mixture of methods presented though the course. The molecular and bioinformatics methods presented in the course are now necessary tools for all graduate students in biological oceanography and phycology, and this introduction will give students a practical introduction that will be applicable to their own projects. Students will then learn how to apply molecular tools such that they can bridge these techniques with physiological experimentation and ecological observations.
Enrollment will be limited to 15 students.