2017 MCAA Conference and General Assembly

Our SINGEK ESR3 Konstantina Mitsi has participated in the 2017 MARIE CURIE ALUMNI ASSOCIATION (MCAA) Conference and General Assembly, which was held on Friday 24th and Saturday 25th March 2017 in Salamanca, Spain.

The program covered the main areas of interests of the MCAA members in terms of career, networking and societal challenges. The event included a poster session and a ‘science lab’ event at which delegates stepped up to the challenge of presenting their project in three minutes maximum.

More info about this event is available here.

We are glad to announce that a new SINGEK paper is out in Scientific Reports/ NatureJournal:

“Accessing the genomic information of unculturable oceanic picoeukaryotes by combining multiple single cells”

J-F. Mangot, R. Logares, P. Sánchez, F. Latorre, Y. Seeleuthner, S. Mondy, M. E. Sieracki, O. Jaillon, P. Wincker, C. de Vargas and R. Massana

Comparison of tetranucleotide frequencies of SAGs in an ESOM map.

Pico-sized eukaryotes play key roles in the functioning of marine ecosystems, but we still have a limited knowledge on their ecology and evolution. The MAST-4 lineage is of particular interest, since it is widespread in surface oceans, presents ecotypic differentiation and has defied culturing efforts so far. Single cell genomics (SCG) are promising tools to retrieve genomic information from these uncultured organisms. However, SCG are based on whole genome amplification, which normally introduces amplification biases that limit the amount of genomic data retrieved from a single cell. Here, we increase the recovery of genomic information from two MAST-4 lineages by co-assembling short reads from multiple Single Amplified Genomes (SAGs) belonging to evolutionary closely related cells. We found that complementary genomic information is retrieved from different SAGs, generating coassembly that features >74% of genome recovery, against about 20% when assembled individually. Even though this approach is not aimed at generating high-quality draft genomes, it allows accessing to the genomic information of microbes that would otherwise remain unreachable. Since most of the picoeukaryotes still remain uncultured, our work serves as a proof-of-concept that can be applied to other taxa in order to extract genomic data and address new ecological and evolutionary questions.

More than 30 researchers, including the 15 recruited Early Stage Researchers (ESRs), have met for the SINGEK Opening Meeting at the Institute of Marine Sciences, Barcelona (7-9 November, 2016).

SINGEK project (Promoting SINgle cell GEnomics to explore the ecology and evolution of hidden microeuKaryotes) will  focus on the study of microeukaryotes in natural systems, among which we can find protozoa, algae and microscopic fungi. The study of microeukaryotes is essential to comprehend eukaryotic diversity and evolution, including the origin of plants and animals, and also to better understand their role  in all ecosystems. In order to address this challenging task, however, the use of new and more accurate molecular techniques is required.

“The SINGEK project has a double objective. On the one hand, study the genomes of novel and uncultured microeukaryotes with the novel Single Cell Genomics (SCG) tool, applied until now in other fields as cancer research. And on the other hand, provide a unique and structured PhD training programme to train a new generation of scientists with the highest expertise in SCG, including also transferable skills essential for successful career development” explains Ramon Massana, ICM researcher in the Marine Biology and Oceanography department, and SINGEK Coordinator.

SINGEK will train 15 ESR from 9 different countries such as EEUU, Germany, Iran, Spain, Greece or Brazil, that will develop their research in fields related to bioinformatics, genomics, ecology and microbial evolution, under the supervision of 15 expert researchers from 12 science institutions from 5 different countries (Spain, France, Belgium, Sweden and UK). The project also counts with 8 Partner Organisations that will be involved in several tasks, as hosting students during their secondments, providing complementary training in complementary skills as scientific writing, or developing the project’s communication and outreach plan at different levels.

“All the research individual projects will cover the world of microorganisms from different perspectives, such as organisms’ interactions, marine microbial community composition and their involvement in climate change mitigation, development and improvement of SCG techniques and DNA sequencing, and other issues like multicellular organism emergence and a more complex view of the tree of life” states Iñaki Ruiz-Trillo, ICREA researcher from the Institute of Evolutionary Biology (CSIC-UPF) and also member of the SINGEK Coordinating Team.

SINGEK has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie program. The project has a duration of 4 years and a budget of 3,9M€.

2^nd edition of the EukRef Workshop

28^th November – 2^nd December 2016, Barcelona

This second workshop that will take place at the Institute of Marine Sciences in Barcelona from November 28th to December 2nd, 2016. It will bring together taxonomists with expertise in individual lineages that span the eukaryotic tree of life to curate reference 18S rDNA sequences of these lineages by incorporating knowledge of phylogenetic, morphological, and/or environmental contextual data. This second edition will be particularly (but not exclusively) focused on Amoebozoa and Rhizaria. During the workshop, the working group will integrate the curation efforts on individual eukaryotic groups into a biological data warehouse consisting of curated sequences, flexible taxonomy, and phylogenetic trees and their underlying sequence alignments. We will further use this 18S rDNA reference database to investigate the environmental distribution of eukaryotic microbes from large-scale HTES datasets. Each curator is encouraged to use their curated data to address research questions of interest. It will be discussed how to tackle such projects and encourage participants to publish their results.

Thanks to the generous contribution of the Moore Foundation, the cost of housing, breakfast and lunch, and reimburse for the cost of flights up to $400 will be covered for participants within Europe and $1500 for those from the rest of the world.

Application deadline: September 16th 2016

Follow EUKREF updates in Twitter: @EukRef