Colomban de Vargas
CNRS Roscoff 

In this seminar, I will tell the story of my greatest scientific experience: Tara Oceans. September 2009, Lorient, France, the schooner Tara cast off to surf the planet and systematically sample the world Ocean biome with a transformative protocol, mixing physics, chemistry, biology, bricolage and high-technologies, academic and private institutions, and ... a lot of courage and friendship!
After 2 circum-global navigations (2009–2013), Tara Oceans has generated unique foundational resources for ocean science, across coarse but inclusive spatio-temporal and taxonomic scales. These include the largest DNA and RNA sequencing effort ever performed for a single biome, millions of plankton images, all these data embedded into a rich context of physico-chemical parameters.
I will illustrate some key scientific results emerging from this planetomics data, and discuss how we are trying to integrate the different layers of biological information to assess the structure, functions, and dynamics of the great plankton interactome, toward integration of biological complexity into modelling of the Ocean and Earth systems.

Bio-sketch: Research Director at the CNRS Roscoff since 2007, Colomban was awarded his PhD in molecular ecology and evolution in 2000 at the University of Geneva, Switzerland. He was then a post-doc at Harvard University, and an Assistant Professor at Rutgers University, USA. Colomban’s passion is to understand the co-evolution between eukaryotic Life and the Earth system. For this, he has been studying: (i) the biodiversity and ecological biodiversification/complexification of protists; (ii) the physiogenomics and cell biology features of key marine protists, particularly from the plankton; (iii) the combination of (i) and (ii) into a systems ecology understanding of the world plankton, integrating across global taxonomic and spatio-temporal scales, including paleo-oceans. Colomban has (co)authored >120 scientific papers, he has led several international research programs on marine eukaryotes and plankton (BOOM, BioMarKs, UniEuk, GO-SEE, Plankton Planet). He was one the founders of the Tara Oceans expedition, and today he is the Director of the international Research Federation ‘Tara GO-SEE -Global Ocean Systems Ecology & Evolution’