A new view of plankton in the global ocean: celebrating 10 years of Tara Oceans

1-4 September 2026 | Heidelberg, Germany/Virtual

07 November 2025

Media Partnership 

between Biobreeding and A new view of plankton in the global ocean: celebrating 10 years of Tara Oceans
 

Conference overview

The last decade has witnessed a revolution in our understanding of the functioning, ecology and evolution of plankton communities at a global scale. Environmental surveys have provided insight into all domains of life in the oceans, from bacteria, archaea, eukaryotes, DNA and RNA viruses. Techniques have advanced from single gene surveys to whole-genome-resolved approaches. Recent years have also witnessed advances in cross-scale plankton automated imaging techniques, feedback microscopy, remote sensing from space, and the acquisition of contextual data from the water column, as well as new computational techniques for big data analysis and deep learning. As ambitious interdisciplinary oceanographic efforts and time-series sites continue to generate and release information-rich data, now is a key moment to highlight the most notable milestones and discoveries, and to showcase how scientists can exploit these data in different ways.

The goal of the conference is to focus on the new fields of plankton science enabled in particular by 10 years of Tara Oceans research, to increase the impact of the newknowledge generated from these datasets, and to foster new collaborations among aquatic microbial ecologists, evolutionary biologists, oceanographers, cell and molecular biologists, geneticists, and more. The objective is also to identify questions that recent discoveries and the arrival of new technologies, methods, and concepts from all corners of the biological sciences now enable us to ask.

Session topics
 
  • Plankton diversity and the unknowns
  • Adaptation, short-term and deep-time evolution
  • Organisation of life through spatial scales and symbioses
  • Underexplored ecosystems (e.g. deep sea, polar systems)
  • Modelling (ecological, metabolic, biogeochemical, evolutionary)
  • Biogeochemical cycles

Abstract submission

We have two different abstract submission deadlines for this event, depending on the type of abstract you want to submit.

You can apply for either an
 
  • oral presentation (submission deadline: 21 April 2026) or
  • poster presentation (submission deadline: 26 May 2026)

More information regarding abstract submission can be found here.

Website:
https://www.embl.org/about/info/course-and-conference-office/events/PGO26-01/?utm_source=Sciepublish&utm_medium=mpreferral&utm_id=PGO26-01
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