Biofilms can form on almost every submerged surface in the marine environment and play important roles in biogeochemical cycling and biofouling. However, biofilm study in the past decades has been focusing on cultured bacterial strains, while molecular ecology of biofilms in in situ marine environments is barely studied. In the present study, we used metagenome-based big data analyses to study the microbial diversity, function, and interaction between microbes and antifouling surfaces in marine biofilms. We showed that, i) the coating of the antifouling compound, butenolide, selectively inhibits adhesion of microbes from a variety of taxonomic groups and targets functional pathways including energy metabolism, drug transport and toxin release in marine biofilms; ii) the transpos...[ Read more ]

Biofilms can form on almost every submerged surface in the marine environment and play important roles in biogeochemical cycling and biofouling. However, biofilm study in the past decades has been focusing on cultured bacterial strains, while molecular ecology of biofilms in in situ marine environments is barely studied. In the present study, we used metagenome-based big data analyses to study the microbial diversity, function, and interaction between microbes and antifouling surfaces in marine biofilms. We showed that, i) the coating of the antifouling compound, butenolide, selectively inhibits adhesion of microbes from a variety of taxonomic groups and targets functional pathways including energy metabolism, drug transport and toxin release in marine biofilms; ii) the transposase genes, which mediate gene transfer among bacteria, play important roles in bacterial attachment to zinc surfaces to establish biofilm communities; iii) the mac gene homologs, which are related to biofilm-mediated larval settlement of Hydroides elegans, are enriched in marine biofilms, providing evidence for their function in natural biofilms; iv) more than 7,300 seawater-derived biofilm-forming microbial ‘species’ (bacteria and archaea) are undetected in seawater, and thus the global ocean microbial diversity reported in previous studies had been underestimated by more than 20%; v) over 95% of the viral sequences in biofilms could not be detected in previously reported marine viral catalogues. Taken together, the thesis work has shed new lights on microbe-surface and microbe-larvae interactions in marine biofilms and pointed out the great taxonomic diversity and functional potentials of the global distributed biofilm communities.