Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

Phytoplankton are aquatic microorganisms that photosynthesize, so like plants on land, they are crucial to aquatic ecosystems because their growth fuels all other organisms. In contrast to plants, however, phytoplankton belong to diverse groups of life, including diatoms, dinoflagellates, and cyanobacteria. This breadth of diversity, as well as their microscopic size, has challenged our abilities to fully characterize phytoplankton communities, their dynamics, and their responses to environmental change. Importantly, as the climate changes, there is an urgent need to identify how all phytoplankton will respond, and whether these changes will fundamentally and permanently change the ecosystem services that they provide. By taking advantage of modern DNA sequencing technologies, my research program will revolutionize how genetic data can be leveraged to provide key ecological insights into phytoplankton communities and develop genetic indicators of ecosystem health. My research team will establish new molecular methods that not only improve identifications across the breadth of phytoplankton diversity, but also enable more accurate quantifications. This research is particularly crucial for the smallest phytoplankton that are only the size of bacteria, but make up over half of phytoplankton biomass. Small phytoplankton are predicted to become increasingly dominant with climate change, and the methods developed by my research program are essential in understanding how the community of small phytoplankton will change alongside the loss of large phytoplankton such as diatoms. My research program will also establish new genetic-based metrics to assess the competitiveness and health of phytoplankton by their nutrient status. Small phytoplankton are generally considered to be better competitors for nutrients than larger phytoplankton when nutrients are scarce, which is predicted to become more common with climate change, but it is not known if this is true for all small phytoplankton. My research team will identify genes and their associated functions to identify how phytoplankton respond to nutrient competition, and which phytoplankton are favoured under low nutrient conditions. The competitiveness of small phytoplankton must be more clearly understood to better predict which phytoplankton will benefit or will be hindered in response to climate change, and the ecosystem consequences of these changes in the phytoplankton community. There is a huge untapped potential in using genetic data to identify the key factors driving phytoplankton community change. My research program will make these advances, which will be developed into standardized methods to track phytoplankton dynamics in aquatic environments worldwide. By developing methods to specifically interrogate small phytoplankton, this research will open further avenues in understanding their ecological roles, especially for those predicted to become more dominant under climate change.