International Journal of Marine Science, 2025, Vol.15, No.6, 313-319 http://www.aquapublisher.com/index.php/ijms 136 this type of research. Tools like HUMAnN2 have been able to break down community functions to the species level, saving time and being precise. The emergence of long-read sequencing technology has "stitched together" many previously difficult-to-assemble full-length biosynthetic gene clusters, and the diversity of secondary metabolites has thus been presented more completely (Huang et al., 2023). Figure 2 Conceptual models illustrating the community assembly and distribution of N-cycling pathways in the oceanic ecosystem (Adopted form Song et al., 2022) 7.2 Stable isotope probing (SIP) for tracing metabolic fluxes If you want to know exactly what a certain Marine microorganism "eats" and which metabolic reactions it participates in, SIP technology is very useful. It relies on feeding microorganisms "labeled" substrates (such as ¹³C, ¹⁵N, D₂O), and then observing which biological macromolecules these labels have landed on. For instance, early on, the role of methylphagocytes in methanol and methylamine metabolism was determined by SIP. In addition to DNA and RNA, lipids and proteins can also be used for SIP labeling. These methods can complement each other and enable people to clearly see the specific destinations of carbon and nitrogen, which is particularly valuable when studying methane oxidation and sulfate reduction in sediments. Sometimes it is necessary to reach the nanoscale to see clearly - NanoSIMS, in combination with FISH and SIP, can track the nutritional interactions between microorganisms at the single-cell level (Yan, 2025). 7.3 Frontiers in synthetic biology and artificial ecosystem simulation Not all research relies on "observation". Nowadays, more and more approaches are to "build a system and take a look". Synthetic biology is like equipping microorganisms with a "program". Some modified Marine bacteria or cyanobacteria can already be applied in biomanufacting, pollution remediation, and even ecological restoration (Bourgade and Stensjo, 2022). Some strains, such as Vibrio natriegens and Halomonas bluephagenesis, which grow fast and have flexible metabolism, are perfectly suitable to be used as "platforms" (Hoff et al., 2020; Von Borzyskowski, 2023). Simulating a complete algal-microbial community is no longer a difficult problem. With the advancement of artificial ecosystem design, researchers have been able to control the population ratio and interaction relationship relatively well (Deter and Lu, 2022; Jiang et al., 2022). Combined with techniques such as spectral analysis and dynamic modeling, it is not only possible to observe community changes in real time, but also to predict how they respond to environmental changes (Meirkhanova et al., 2024).
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