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What can we learn from spatial patterns in the ocean? This study suggests planktonic patterns are uncorrelated from physical patchiness, poorly captured from satellite observations, and an underutilized window into ocean biogeochemistry.

Bacterial symbionts of the Endozoicomonadaceae family are frequently found in marine animals but are poorly understood. Using data from the Tara Pacific expedition, this study of Endozoicomonadaceae ecology at an ocean basin-scale reveals that corals across the Pacific Ocean have different host-symbiont association strategies that are determined at the bacterial lineage level.

Using data from the Tara Pacific expedition, this study shows that a key driver of variation in coral telomere DNA length across the Pacific Ocean is the history of water temperature. The telomere lengths of short-lived, stress-sensitive Pocillopora colonies are more sensitive to seasonal temperature variations than those of long-lived and stress-resistant Porites colonies.

Cell monolayers have serious limitations for cell biological investigations and for cell-based assays in drug screening and toxicity studies. However, the establishment of three-dimensional cultures as a mainstream approach requires the development of reliable protocols, new cell lines and suitable imaging techniques.

Using data from the Tara Pacific expedition, this study reports the biogeography and the diversity of microbiomes collected from corals, fish and plankton in 99 reefs across the Pacific Ocean. The large richness of Pacific Ocean reef microorganisms, when extrapolated to all fish and corals of the Pacific, represents the current estimated total prokaryotic diversity for the entire Earth.

Using data from the Tara Pacific expedition to investigate symbiont fidelity and patterns of gene expression across a thermal gradient, this study shows that Pocillopora corals have a three-tiered strategy of thermal acclimatization that is underpinned by host–photosymbiont specificity, host transcriptomic plasticity, and differential photosymbiotic associations under extreme warming.

Here we discuss barriers to reproducibility in regard to microscopes and related hardware, along with best practices for sharing novel designs created using computer-aided design (CAD). We hope to start a fruitful community discussion on how instrument development, especially in microscopy, can become more open and reproducible, ultimately leading to better, more trustworthy science.

Ten years of development in light-sheet microscopy have led to spectacular demonstrations of its capabilities. The technology is ready to assist biologists in tackling scientific problems, but are biologists ready for it? Here we discuss the interdisciplinary challenges light-sheet microscopy presents for biologists and highlight available resources.

The biology of many marine protists, such as stramenopiles, remains obscure. Here, the authors exploit single-cell genomics and metagenomics to analyze the genome content and apparent oceanic distribution of seven prevalent lineages of uncultured heterotrophic stramenopiles.

Marine microbial eukaryotes and zooplankton display enormous diversity and largely unexplored physiologies. Here, the authors use metatranscriptomics to analyze four organismal size fractions from open-ocean stations, providing the largest reference collection of eukaryotic transcripts from any single biome.

This Commentary discusses the problem of phototoxicity in live imaging and suggests guidelines to improve its assessment and reporting.

A study part of the Tara Pacific Expedition that surveyed newly sequenced and publicly available metagenomes and genomes revealed pervasive non-retroviral dinoflagellate-infecting endogenous +ssRNA viral elements within coral symbionts.

Pocillopora species, sampled on the TARA Pacific Expedition, have greater phenotypic plasticity in response to environmental variables than Porites species, whose phenotypes were dictated by coral host genetics and past climate, according to extensive multi-biomarker analysis.

The metabolome of natural populations of Pocillopora spp., Porites spp. and Millepora cf. platyphylla coral are distinct at genus level but not within genotypes and environmental drivers influence metabolomic plasticity, suggest multi-omic analyses conducted during the Tara Pacific expedition.

Light microscopy enables researchers to observe cellular mechanisms with high spatial and temporal resolution. However, the increasing complexity of current imaging technologies, coupled with financial constraints of potential users, hampers the general accessibility and potential reach of cutting-edge microscopy. Open microscopy can address this issue by making well-designed and well-documented hardware and software solutions openly available to a broad audience. In this Comment, we provide a definition of open microscopy and present recent projects in the field. We discuss current and future challenges of open microscopy and their implications for funders, policymakers, researchers and scientists. We believe that open microscopy requires a holistic approach. Sample preparation, designing and building of hardware components, writing software, data acquisition and data interpretation must go hand in hand to enable interdisciplinary and reproducible science to the benefit of society.