Ship-seq: Nanopore sequencing of polar microbes on board icebreakers

Polar oceans belong to the most underexplored ecosystems on Earth, yet they are considered biodiversity hotspots and they disproportionally contribute to global biogeochemical cycles. Furthermore, they are most threatened by global warming. Thus, there is an urgent need to study how environmental change impacts polar organisms that drive biogeochemical cycles such as marine microbes. However, most of these microbes are difficult to study as they need certain temperatures to survive, which limits our ability to transport them to our laboratories for experiments. Long-term maintenance in the laboratory is also challenging as many of them are cold-adapted and require polar-specific environments (e.g. ice and snow). Our project addresses this challenge by bringing the Oxford Nanopore Technologies MinION sequencing technology to polar oceans for real-time studies on the diversity and function of microbial communities from the surface polar ocean and lower atmosphere. This will be a proof-of-concept study to show that probing and analysing polar microbes at the ocean-atmosphere interface can be done while on an expedition in polar oceans. Benefits are manifold: a) real-time assessment of in situ microbial diversity, b) real-time analysis of in situ or on-board experiments in polar oceans and c) genome and transcriptome sequencing of sensitive but ecologically relevant polar microbes.