Pan-European Lake Sampling - Microbial Eco-genomics (PELAGICS)

Freshwater habitats are critical for all terrestrial life, yet the vast majority of their microbial inhabitants (pro- and eukaryotes) remain enigmatic, outside the bounds of cultivation. The recent development of novel cultivation methods, coupled with advances in sequencing now provides an opportunity to finally unravel freshwater microbial diversity. The PELAGICS project plans a coordinated pan-European sampling campaign (70 lakes) with 24 collaborating scientists from 16 European countries. With novel media mimicking natural conditions and semi-automated high-throughput isolation we aim for stable cultivation and whole-genome sequencing of 500 prokaryotes and 50 unicellular eukaryotes. Moreover, terabyte scale deep-metagenomic sequencing (ca. 18 TB) will allow recovery of thousands of metagenome-assembled genomes for pro-, eukaryotes and viruses. This large-scale effort will finally uncover the microbial diversity (pro- and eukaryotes), their natural interactions and ecological roles in aquatic food webs.