Diversity of Life
Our lab studies the diversity of aquatic life in marine, estuarine, and freshwater systems around the world, from bacteria and archaea to plankton and fishes.
Selected Published Works
Tropical Plankton Diversity
The beauty and complexity of zooplankton got me hooked on studying the diversity of species and using molecular tools to investigate their roles in ecosystems. While molecular identification is considered the best level of ID for these sometimes challenging to identify creatures, pairing morphological identification of organisms and sequencing their DNA is a passion of mine and I am always interested in contributing new information to our knowledge of the diversity of life on earth!
Jungbluth MJ & Lenz PH. (2013). Copepod diversity in a subtropical bay based on a fragment of the mitochondrial COI gene. Journal of Plankton Research, 35(3), 630–643. https://doi.org/10.1093/plankt/fbt015
Deep-sea Meroplankton
The deep sea is one of the least explored places on the planet. We have participated in studies characterizing the genetic diversity of mobile larvae of deep sea organisms, and guess what, they are largely from undescribed species!
Kersten O, ... , Jungbluth MJ, ..., Goetze E. (2019). Larval assemblages over the abyssal plain in the Pacific are highly diverse and spatially patchy. PeerJ, 7, e7691. https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.7691
Jungbluth SP, Amend JP, Rappé MS (2017). Metagenome sequencing and 98 microbial genomes from Juan de Fuca Ridge flank subsurface fluids. Scientific Data, 4, 170037. https://doi.org/10.1038/sdata.2017.37
Nayfach S, ... Jungbluth SP, ..., Eloe-Fadrosh EA. (2021). A genomic catalog of Earth’s microbiomes. Nature Biotechnology, 39(4), 499–509. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41587-020-0718-6
Schulz F, ..., Jungbluth SP, ..., Woyke T. (2020). Giant virus diversity and host interactions through global metagenomics. Nature, 578(7795), 432–436. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-1957-x