ALBERT

Description: The biological carbon pump is the process by which CO2 is transformed to organic carbon via photosynthesis, exported through sinking particles, and finally sequestered in the deep ocean. While the intensity of the pump correlates with plankton community composition, the underlying ecosystem structure driving the process remains largely uncharacterized. Here we use environmental and metagenomic data gathered during the Tara Oceans expedition to improve our understanding of carbon export in the oligotrophic ocean. We show that specific plankton communities, from the surface and deep chlorophyll maximum, correlate with carbon export at 150 m and highlight unexpected taxa such as Radiolaria and alveolate parasites, as well as Synechococcus and their phages, as lineages most strongly associated with carbon export in the subtropical, nutrient-depleted, oligotrophic ocean. Additionally, we show that the relative abundance of a few bacterial and viral genes can predict a significant fraction of the variability in carbon export in these regions.〈br /〉〈br /〉〈a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4851848/" target="_blank"〉〈img src="https://static.pubmed.gov/portal/portal3rc.fcgi/4089621/img/3977009" border="0"〉〈/a〉   〈a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4851848/" target="_blank"〉This paper as free author manuscript - peer-reviewed and accepted for publication〈/a〉〈br /〉〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Notes: 〈/span〉Guidi, Lionel -- Chaffron, Samuel -- Bittner, Lucie -- Eveillard, Damien -- Larhlimi, Abdelhalim -- Roux, Simon -- Darzi, Youssef -- Audic, Stephane -- Berline, Leo -- Brum, Jennifer R -- Coelho, Luis Pedro -- Espinoza, Julio Cesar Ignacio -- Malviya, Shruti -- Sunagawa, Shinichi -- Dimier, Celine -- Kandels-Lewis, Stefanie -- Picheral, Marc -- Poulain, Julie -- Searson, Sarah -- Tara Oceans Consortium Coordinators -- Stemmann, Lars -- Not, Fabrice -- Hingamp, Pascal -- Speich, Sabrina -- Follows, Mick -- Karp-Boss, Lee -- Boss, Emmanuel -- Ogata, Hiroyuki -- Pesant, Stephane -- Weissenbach, Jean -- Wincker, Patrick -- Acinas, Silvia G -- Bork, Peer -- de Vargas, Colomban -- Iudicone, Daniele -- Sullivan, Matthew B -- Raes, Jeroen -- Karsenti, Eric -- Bowler, Chris -- Gorsky, Gabriel -- England -- Nature. 2016 Apr 28;532(7600):465-70. doi: 10.1038/nature16942. Epub 2016 Feb 10.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Author address: 〈/span〉Sorbonne Universites, UPMC Universite Paris 06, CNRS, Laboratoire d'oceanographie de Villefranche (LOV), Observatoire Oceanologique, 06230 Villefranche-sur-Mer, France. ; Department of Oceanography, University of Hawaii, Honolulu, Hawaii 96822, USA. ; Department of Microbiology and Immunology, Rega Institute, KU Leuven, Herestraat 49, 3000 Leuven, Belgium. ; Center for the Biology of Disease, VIB, Herestraat 49, 3000 Leuven, Belgium. ; Department of Applied Biological Sciences, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Pleinlaan 2, 1050 Brussels, Belgium. ; Sorbonne Universites, UPMC Univ Paris 06, CNRS, Institut de Biologie Paris-Seine (IBPS), Evolution Paris Seine, F-75005, Paris, France. ; Ecole Normale Superieure, PSL Research University, Institut de Biologie de l'Ecole Normale Superieure (IBENS), CNRS UMR 8197, INSERM U1024, 46 rue d'Ulm, F-75005 Paris, France. ; Sorbonne Universites, UPMC Universite Paris 06, CNRS, Laboratoire Adaptation et Diversite en Milieu Marin, Station Biologique de Roscoff, 29680 Roscoff, France. ; LINA UMR 6241, Universite de Nantes, EMN, CNRS, 44322 Nantes, France. ; Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona 85721, USA. ; Structural and Computational Biology, European Molecular Biology Laboratory, Meyerhofstr. 1, 69117 Heidelberg, Germany. ; Directors' Research European Molecular Biology Laboratory Meyerhofstr. 1, 69117 Heidelberg, Germany. ; CEA - Institut de Genomique, GENOSCOPE, 2 rue Gaston Cremieux, 91057 Evry, France. ; Aix Marseille Universite, CNRS, IGS, UMR 7256, 13288 Marseille, France. ; Department of Geosciences, Laboratoire de Meteorologie Dynamique (LMD), Ecole Normale Superieure, 24 rue Lhomond, 75231 Paris CEDEX 05, France. ; Dept of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USA. ; School of Marine Sciences, University of Maine, Orono, Maine 04469, USA. ; Institute for Chemical Research, Kyoto University, Gokasho, Uji, Kyoto, 611-0011, Japan. ; PANGAEA, Data Publisher for Earth and Environmental Science, University of Bremen, 28359 Bremen, Germany. ; MARUM, Center for Marine Environmental Sciences, University of Bremen, 28359 Bremen, Germany. ; CNRS, UMR 8030, CP 5706 Evry, France. ; Universite d'Evry, UMR 8030, CP 5706 Evry, France. ; Department of Marine Biology and Oceanography, Institute of Marine Sciences (ICM)-CSIC, Pg. Maritim de la Barceloneta 37-49, Barcelona E0800, Spain. ; Max-Delbruck-Centre for Molecular Medicine, 13092 Berlin, Germany. ; Stazione Zoologica Anton Dohrn, Villa Comunale, 80121 Naples, Italy.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Record origin:〈/span〉 〈a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26863193" target="_blank"〉PubMed〈/a〉

Description: Motivation: Metabolic engineering aims at modulating the capabilities of metabolic networks by changing the activity of biochemical reactions. The existing constraint-based approaches for metabolic engineering have proven useful, but are limited only to reactions catalogued in various pathway databases. Results: We consider the alternative of designing synthetic strategies which can be used not only to characterize the maximum theoretically possible product yield but also to engineer networks with optimal conversion capability by using a suitable biochemically feasible reaction called ‘stoichiometric capacitance’. In addition, we provide a theoretical solution for decomposing a given stoichiometric capacitance over a set of known enzymatic reactions. We determine the stoichiometric capacitance for genome-scale metabolic networks of 10 organisms from different kingdoms of life and examine its implications for the alterations in flux variability patterns. Our empirical findings suggest that the theoretical capacity of metabolic networks comes at a cost of dramatic system's changes. Contact: larhlimi@mpimp-golm.mpg.de , or nikoloski@mpimp-golm.mpg.de Supplementary Information: Supplementary tables are available at Bioinformatics online.