Curate and annotate what we know about deep-sea marine microbial eukaryotes. Much of what we know about deep-sea microorganisms comes from the biogeography and inferred ecology of environmental species or strains. This database originates from deep-sea marine habitats, specifically hydrothermal vents. Species and strains capture are assumed to be present in these environments; however what we know about their ecological roles remains understudied. This database project involves extensive literature searches, comparative analyses, and inventories of these species, so we can get closer to having a more complete understanding of the roles protists play in the deep ocean.
There are three primary goals of this project: (1) Complement our comprehensive sequence database of deep-sea microbial eukaryotic diversity with metadata on taxonomic nomenclature (Costello et al. 2013; Horton et al. 2017), tree of life placement (e.g., iTOL and Open Tree of Life Letunic and Bork 2021; Michonneau et al. 2016; OpenTreeOfLife et al. 2019), a functional trait database (e.g., cell morphology, motility, ploidy, etc.; Ramond et al. 2019), and accounts of planktonic protist interactions (Bjorbækmo et al. 2020), (2) to highlight the number of taxonomic lineages that are severely lacking representation in the sequence reference database (Guillou et al. 2012), and (3) to look for patterns in the assignment of the phylogenetically elusive protists that may be related to fluid geochemistry or biogeography.