The Department of Biology is excited to invite you to a seminar entitled "Microbes in Extreme Environments: What is the Scale of Diversity?" by Dr. JayDiii Grattepanche, Assistant Research Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at Temple University on Monday, October 14 at 3pm in BL234. We kindly ask you to make every effort to attend.

Host: Dr. Robert Sanders

More information about the speaker here: https://jeandavidgrattepanche.github.io

Abstract: Regarding the microbes, we have for a long time believed that "everything is everywhere". Within the past two decades, methods have been developed to decipher the member of microbial community, even without morphological characteristics. In my research, I look at the scale of diversity of microbes and aim to identify the parameters that drive this diversity. For this seminar, I am using example for my recent cruises in Antarctica, where I am looking at the distribution of marine microbial eukaryotes related to the seasons, location, and depth. To better understand the distribution, the community is decomposed in microplankton, nanoplankton and pico-plankton, as the microbial food web is strongly organized around organismal size. I will also provide examples from subaerial biofilms collected on stone and from metatranscriptomes conducted on ciliate communities from the Long Island Sound.