Paola Bertucci is Scientific Expedition Manager of the TREC expedition (Traversing European Coastlines), which is an expedition to study coastal ecosystems and their response to the environment, from molecules to communities.

The TREC expedition will start in April 2023 and is expected to last until June 2024. During that time, the researchers will gather biological samples and environmental data along the European coastline at more than 120 land-sea transects. In selected sites, time-series measurements will be performed to account for annual changes.

The expedition will combine ocean exploration, conducted by the Tara Ocean Foundation and Tara Oceans Consortium, with parallel sampling of soil, sediment, shallow water, and selected model organisms in various habitats, supported by EMBL’s land-based mobile services and local marine research institutions. Organismal diversity will be studied across scales, from viruses, bacteria, and protists to multicellular groups such as algae and animals. Analysis will involve various meta- and single-cell omics as well as barcoding techniques that will be combined with innovative microscopy pipelines including automated imaging and electron microscopy. This will allow unprecedented detail in associating molecular and morphological data at the single-organism and single-cell level. Besides standard oceanographic metadata, special emphasis will be on detecting metabolites as well as physical and chemical (i.e. inorganic and organic pollutants such as metals, pesticides, hormones, and antibiotics) characterisation of the sampled habitats, providing the environmental framework to the biodiversity and adaptation analyses.

Overall, the expedition will conduct systematic, standardised, and integrated sampling with multimodal environmental metadata acquisition. This integrated profiling across environmental and man-made gradients of micro- and macroscopic life will enable us to obtain a first of the kind, pan-European census of European coastal ecosystems.

Find more information here: www.embl.org/about/info/trec/expedition/
 

Jens-Christian Svenning is the director of Center for Biodiversity Dynamics in a Changing World (BIOCHANGE). His research is centered on biodiversity and ecosystems, integrating “Big Data” ecology with field-based ecology, remote sensing and paleoecology and socio-ecological systems, and has joint focus on fundamental questions with applied research in climate change, alien invasions, conservation, rewilding and sustainability science. Prof. Svenning works on both plants and animals. His work is global in scope, with long-term research foci not only in Europe, but also in Latin America, Africa and East Asia.

Talya Dayton is a new Group Leader at the EMBL tissue biology and disease modeling unit in Barcelona, Spain. Her group develops 3D, in vitro organoid models of human tissue (airway/lung and patient tumors) to recapitulate developmental and cancer phenotypes of a specialized, hormone-producing cell type, the neuroendocrine cell. Talya has two broad areas of interest – development and cancer – and her research group wants to understand how these intersect and can be manipulated for patient benefit.

Trine Tramm is consultant, M.D. at Department of Pathology, Aarhus University Hospital with special responsibility for breast pathology. She is a board-member of the Pathology Committee of the Danish Breast Cancer Group. Her research interests are identification of biomarkers with predictive value in relation to the benefit of radiotherapy, particularly in patients with breast cancer or head/neck cancer, including the importance of the pre-existing immune system for the effect of radiotherapy. Furthermore, she is principal investigator of a national study on precursor lesions in breast cancer.