First scientific results from the Tara Oceans expedition

Planktonic world: the new frontier

On May 22, in a special issue of Science, an international, interdisciplinary, team of scientists maps the biodiversity of a wide range of planktonic organisms, exploring their interactions - mainly parasitic, and how they impact and are affected by their environment, primarily the temperature. Based on a portion of the 35000 samples collected from all the world’s oceans during the 2009-2013 expedition on board the schooner TARA, this data provides the scientific community with unprecedented resources, including a catalogue of several million new genes, that will transform how we study the oceans and assess climate change.

The researchers, who spent more than three years sampling plankton on the research schooner Tara, have unveiled the first global analyses from the Tara Oceans consortium in five reports in the 22 May issue of Science.