| Summary: | 1st Iberian Ecological Society Meeting (2019); XIV Congreso Nacional de la Asociación Española de Ecología Terrestre (AEET), Ecology: an integrative science in the Anthropocene, 4-7 February 2019, Barcelona, Spain The Mediterranean Sea is a unique small-scale ocean with a few remarkable characteristics: the deep waters are warm (minimal temperature is ca. 12°C), has strong east-to-west gradients in nutrient availability and phosphorous limitation and in relative water transparency, and various shallow sills partition it into clearly defined basins, with the coexistence of different varieties of deep water masses in the bathypelagic. These characteristics strongly contrast with those of the nearby North Atlantic Ocean at the same latitude. Understanding the characteristics of the Mediterranean prokaryotes might illustrate what to expect in a future more oligotrophic global ocean. In May 2014 we sampled an E to W transect in the Mediterranean that also included a few stations in the North Eastern Atlantic Ocean. We compared the structure of the prokaryotic communities in all these basins using flow cytometry and high-throughput sequencing of the 16S rDNA gene, and the potential activity using radioactive tracers (tritiated leucine) and metagenomics. In the deep waters we defined water masses and studied their characteristic microbial and genetic imprints. We will discuss the characteristics of the microbes thriving in the Mediterranean ocean by basin, depth layer and water mass, alongside with a discussion of the factors that determine the changes in the activity, abundance, single-cell properties, community structure and genomic potential across these habitats Peer Reviewed
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