PNNL

Abstract

Thrust 3 of the Northwest Biopreparedness Research in a Virtual Environment was an expansive project including method development, sample collection and sequence analysis. The sampling occurred over a multi-year period to?generate metagenomic datasets that inform?cyanophage-picocyanobacterial?interactions in the Salish Sea across a moderate timeframe and geographical range.?Part of the thrust’s aim was to validate how much experimental structural and multiomics work in a model organism (Prochlorococcus Marinus, str. MED4) from thrusts 1 and 2 would carry over into a broader range of related organisms in the natural world, to address a fundamental question in scientific preparation for epidemics: whether and how much experimental information from known and experimentally tractable species can translate to actionable biological information in unknown species. In other words, thrust 3 aimed to find out whether the model organism experiments matter in terms of how organisms interact. This report updates work described in Johnson and Pollock 2025 (1).