Towards a Global Perspective of the Marine Microbiome

Marine microbes play fundamental roles in nutrient cycling and climate regulation at a planetary scale. The field of marine microbial ecology has experienced major breakthroughs following the application of high-throughput sequencing and cultureindependent methodologies that have pushed the exploration of the marine microbiome to an unprecedented scale. This chapter overviews how the advances in gene- and genome-centric approaches as well as in culturing and single cell physiological methodologies in conjunction with global oceanographic circumnavigation expeditions and long-term time series are fueling our understanding of the biogeography, temporal dynamics, functional diversity, and evolutionary processes of microbial populations. We discuss how the joint effort of all those integrative approaches will help to boost our knowledge of the marine microbiome to reach a predictive understanding of how it is going to evolve in future scenarios.