Marine microorganisms. Mapping of marine microorganisms from Qatari Marine Environment

The principal objective of the proposed project is to establish a comprehensive understanding of microbial biodiversity (bacteria, archaea, fungi and protists) in Qatari coastal waters and to detect the most ecologically relevant microbial taxa using massive parallel rDNA/RNA and metagenome sequencing integrated with environmental and phenotypic organismic metadata and GIS mapping. We will combine the genetic and contextual data to investigate ecological and evolutionary questions in marine microbial diversity in Qatar: How many microbes, who, where, when, and why? We will correlate change in marine microbial diversity with environmental conditions and anthropogenic pressures (pollution, nutrient input). We will assess the ecosystem services of marine microbial diversity and identify its relative role in terms of global ecology and human food, health, and biotechnology. This project will bring together the expertise in state-of-the art high-throughput molecular biology methods, computational biology, microbial diversity and physiology, cultivation and genomics to investigate and make use of the coastal microbial diversity in the Arabian Gulf surrounding Qatar.