Title: Integrating knowledge from genomic networks of association and interaction into predictive ocean models
Earth System Models (ESMs) play a crucial role in assessing impacts on ocean biogeochemistry and biology in the global ocean. However, ESM projections of biological change neglect the growing insight from genomic datasets. Instead, metabolic models arise from advances in Systems Biology. They focus on the molecular functioning of organisms under different environmental conditions, suggesting that integrating ESMs with metabolic models would improve our ability to deliver a molecular, ecological, and evolutionary understanding of the links between environmental change and the phenology of organisms. This talk presents recent computational modelling that abstract the metabolic network capacity called the metabolic niche. This new formal definition of the fundamental niche is based on the genome-scale description of a given organism. It approximates the capacity of an organism to survive based on nutrient availability. It shows that the presence-absence of genes is insufficient to describe the niche and metabolic niche modelling allows for the investigation of the most important reactions for organisms survival of emblematic organisms such as diatoms or cyanobacteria. When intertwined with ESMs, the same concept predicts plankton's global scale metabolite production and the molecular response of organisms to environmental changes. In particular, these results highlight several acclimation strategies occurring globally that are characterized by nutritional stresses and their physiological consequences for maintaining growth rates. These include critical phenotypic traits such as energy storage via glycogen or lipids or mixotrophy, neglected so far by ESMs. This talk will demonstrate the potential of integrating genomic knowledge into biogeochemical modelling for including adaptation and evolutionary mechanisms in climate studies.