Coastal pelagic waters are one of the most productive regions and have a critical role in the carbon cycle on our planet. Microbes living therein lay the foundations for this ecosystem and support diverse habitats including estuary, coral reef, mangrove, seagrass, and rocky beach. Nowadays, these microorganisms including bacteria, archaea, microalgae, and viruses have been facing higher risk of survival and proliferation. Because coastal waters receive a large amount of anthropogenic input of nutrients, CO₂, and pollutants such as heavy metals, microplastics and antibiotics, these combined with global changes such as ocean warming and acidification make environments of future coastal waters become harsher for microbes, thus causing multiple stresses (e.g. rising temperature, eutrophication, acidification, increasing light intensity, UV damage, and diverse pollutants) on them. In turn, their metabolic responses and feedbacks of community structure and interaction networks affect the health of coastal ecosystems, and ultimately influence goods and services provided by this system. Currently, culture-independent technologies, e.g. amplicon sequencing, metagenomics, metatranscriptomics, and metaproteomics have greatly enhanced our understanding of natural microbial communities both at a compositional and functional level. These in situ investigations combined with laboratory omics-based experiments will improve our understanding of the effects of global changes on microbial ecology in the coastal pelagic ecosystem.

The Research Topic aims to reveal how microbes at levels from species to community respond or adapt to changing environments in coastal pelagic waters. The topic mainly focuses on the application of omics approaches (genomic/ metagenomic, transcriptomic/ metatranscriptomic, proteomic/ metaproteomic, or metabolomic/ metabonomic) to provide short-term response and long-term adaptation of laboratory-culture species or in situ communities to environmental stressors due to anthropogenic activity and/or global changes.

Both original research articles and reviews are invited to contribute to this Research Topic, which may include but not limited to:

• Understanding at species level : How a coastal planktonic microorganism adjusts its metabolism in response to single or multiple environmental stresses; metabolic adjustment of this species after a long-term adaptation to environmental changes in coastal waters.

• Understanding at community level: providing evidences of microbial community shifts in composition and function as changes of coastal environments; determine the environmental drivers; predicting future trends of microbial community in coastal waters.

• Understanding of microbial connectivity: documenting the diverse microbial interactions between species and providing molecular mechanism; determining environmental factors that shape these relationships in current coastal waters; assessing how coastal environments alter microbial interactions in the future.

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Frontiers in Marine Science

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