Latest tech unlocks deep sea mysteries hidden in museum collections

A rare brittle-star from deep-water off New Caledonia. Photo by Caroline Harding/Museums Victoria.

One of the largest distributional and evolutionary DNA datasets seen in marine science has been constructed by researchers from the Museums Victoria Research Institute. They have spent 15 years sequencing deep-sea fauna from museum collections across the globe. Shedding new light on our understanding of deep sea life, the research program seeks to answer questions such as: Where and when did deep sea life begin? How did it spread throughout the oceans that cover over 70% of the Earth’s surface?

The pursuit of big ambitions like mapping patterns of deep-sea biodiversity across the globe creates massive datasets. But these large datasets come with substantial computational requirements, which are not always available. Dr Tim O’Hara, Senior Curator at Museums Victoria, is well aware of this challenge:

“We didn’t have in-house access to the computing infrastructure required to process such large amounts of raw genetic data. We had to find the computing power we needed to process our raw genetic data, create phylogenies (trees of life), and run models that explore evolutionary and biogeographic relationships.”

Tim uses museum collections to answer large-scale questions about the distribution of seafloor animals around the globe, and leads the museum’s brittle-star (ophiuroid) research program. Ophiuroids are widespread on seafloors across the globe, making them an ideal model species to understand distribution patterns across the last 100 million years.

“We extract nuclear and mitochondrial DNA to construct an enormous tree of life, which now contains 2700 samples. This enables us to determine where species originated and spread across the oceans. Since no one has really achieved this before, we are expecting to make a series of novel and interesting discoveries.”

Tim’s team at Melbourne Museum requested support through the Australian BioCommons Leadership Share, or ABLeS. The program was specifically designed to support researchers like Tim, who don’t have local access to the digital infrastructures they need and aren’t regular users of high performance computing facilities. By providing access to appropriate and scalable bioinformatics resources, ABLeS empowers researchers without a background in computational research and who are not currently supported by merit-based allocation schemes to conduct their research
Read more about the technical details of the support ABLeS provides The Ophiuroid Project or read more about Tim’s research.