High-throughput DNA sequencing technologies have revolutionized the field of microbial and fish genomics, providing unprecedented insights into marine organisms’ genetic and functional diversity. These technologies allow for the comprehensive profiling of microbial communities, revealing the identities and functions of microbes within ocean ecosystems. This enables us to understand the intricate relationships between microbial species, their metabolic pathways, and their responses to environmental changes. For fish genomics, high-throughput sequencing has enabled whole genome sequencing, transcriptomics, and epigenomic studies at an unimaginable resolution and scale. Epigenetics studies heritable changes in gene expression not caused by alterations in DNA sequence but mediated through mechanisms like DNA methylation, histone modifications, and non-coding RNAs. This process introduces additional complexity to our understanding of marine life. The wealth of DNA and RNA data has shed light on fish evolutionary biology, physiology, and responses to environmental stressors, including climate change and anthropogenic activities. As our understanding of the ocean microbiome and fish genomics expands, we are confronted with unprecedented data complexity and volume. This necessitates a collaborative effort across disciplines, notably integrating mathematical tools and principles to analyze and interpret vast and diverse omics data from the ocean. Mathematical tools contribute significantly to our understanding of marine microbial interaction networks by capturing their inherent complexities and dynamics. These networks, which depict ecological interactions such as mutualism or parasitism, can help predict the response of marine ecosystems to environmental fluctuations, thereby serving as tools for ecosystem conservation and management. Yet, mathematical approaches for building microbial networks are far from perfect, with few methods addressing causality, network stability, or predicting long-term effects in topology. In fish biology, a hot topic is the inheritance of epimutations. However, there has yet to be an agreement on calculating epigenetic inheritance. Thus, a major need for the scientific community working on the inheritance of epimutations is to have a method that can robustly determine the degree of inheritance of epimutations and their association with a given phenotype. All in all, by decoding the complex patterns of microbial interaction networks and genetic and epigenetic information in microbes and fish, we expect to gain a deeper understanding of marine life and its role in maintaining the health and resilience of ecosystems

ICM-CRM Meeting 2023, New Bridges between Marine Sciences and Mathematics, 2-10 November 2023

Peer reviewed