MSCA Fellow in the field of jellyfish-microbes interactions
- Your supervisor for your research through training project will be Tinkara Tinta and here is link to her references;
ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6740-8973
Blooms of gelatinous zooplankton can represent a significant, but largely overlooked, source of organic matter (OM) in the ocean. In this context, jellyfish were recently recognized as important agents of carbon export to the ocean’s interior, highlighting the necessity of including jellyfish into ocean biogeochemical models. In particularly, since jellyfish will likely thrive under projected changes of oceanic habitats. The interactions between microbes, jellyfish and jellyfish-derived OM represent a knowledge gap that needs to be addressed to accurately incorporate jellyfish in ocean carbon budgets.
In this context we propose projects topics related (but not limited) to:
- disentangling the biochemical complexity of the OM encapsulates and released by vast diversity of different jellyfish species at molecular level;
- elucidating the fate of jellyfish detritus in the ocean to improve the flux estimates of jellyfish carbon and nitrogen to different depth layers of the oceanic water column and allow us to better constrain the amount of jellyfish biomass deposited at the seafloor and hence determine its impact on benthos;
- link between microbes, jellyfish and jellyfish-derived OM using state-of-the-art approaches in marine microbial ecology, coupling-omics with the characterization of the OM pool at the individual compound level.
