Moore Notes 8 28 13

Group Call

• Participants: Katie, Tom, Josh, Sarah, Ladan, Guillaume, Dongying, Stephen

• Katie: sampling random (sub)trees with fixed number of leaves and a target PD
  • Aram will follow up with Dongying

• Google Earth Geo for Good workshop

• Google exacycle compute resources getting set up

• Shotgun metagenomic sequencing
  • EMP samples are mostly coastal (see map)
    • Costal samples are geographically clustered
    • Open ocean samples are mostly not surface waters (benthic, pelagic, sediments)
  • Other potential samples
    • Gulf of Mexico (Jack's, same as EMP?), Carribean (EMP and Tom's contact)
    • Josh: what about petri dish sampling of ocean-air interface on coasts?
    • Katie will follow up with Jack to see if he has something else
  • Citizen science?

• PICRUSt paper came out yesterday
  • Maybe we can do functional analysis based on 16S data
  • How deep is MICROBIS 16s sequencing vs. validation analyses in their paper
    • Politics of working with MICROBIS?
  • Katie: Maybe niche maps are OK even if individual families are not well quantified
  • Josh: But is a functional diversity map very interesting (might just look like the 16s map)?
    • When would they look different
  • The most interesting families (ecologically correlated) may not be well quantified
  • Sarah: could use independent shotgun metagenomes at a few location for validation
  • Could this approach address the question of endemism of protein families? Or carbon sequestration questions?
  • Tom will discuss feasibility with Morgan, Guillaume will get it installed

• Tom subcontract: next time