Study the communities of bacteria and protists in the Western Pacific Ocean

Despite the importance, the knowledge of microbial community assembly and the association below photic is poorly understood. Here, we investigate assembly mechanisms and associations of different sized ocean microbiota, i.e., free-living (FL, 0.22-3 um) and particle-associated (PL, >3 um) bacteria, and protists (0.22-200 um), in water columns of Western Pacific using high throughput sequencing on the rRNA gene.