Background: Pollution–unwanted waste released to air, water, and land by human activity–is
the largest environmental cause of disease in the world today. It is responsible for an …

A planetary-scale understanding of the ocean ecosystem, particularly in light of climate
change, is crucial. Here, we review the work of Tara Oceans, an international …

Brown algae are important players in the global carbon cycle by fixing carbon dioxide into 1
Gt of biomass annually, yet the fate of fucoidan—their major cell wall polysaccharide …

Background For decades, 16S ribosomal RNA sequencing has been the primary means for
identifying the bacterial species present in a sample with unknown composition. One of the …

A wide variety of enzymatic pathways that produce specialized metabolites in bacteria, fungi
and plants are known to be encoded in biosynthetic gene clusters. Information about these …

Photosynthesis evolved in the ocean more than 2 billion years ago and is now performed by
a wide range of evolutionarily distinct organisms, including both prokaryotes and …

Marine microbes have tremendous diversity, but a fundamental question remains
unanswered: why are there so many microbial species in the sea? The idea of functional …

Traditional and emerging human activities are increasingly putting pressures on marine
ecosystems and impacting their ability to sustain ecological and human communities. To …

Marine environmental monitoring has tended to focus on site-specific methods of
investigation. These traditional methods have low spatial and temporal resolution and are …

Abstract Background The Environment Ontology (ENVO; http://www. environmentontology.
org/), first described in 2013, is a resource and research target for the semantically …