The stakes of this gap are enormous. Marine microbes drive nutrient cycling, carbon sequestration and climate regulation, and they generate roughly half of the oxygen in Earth’s atmosphere. The regions being neglected are not biological backwaters but critical engines of planetary biogeochemistry: the Southern Ocean, which buffers heat and carbon exchange between atmosphere and deep sea; the Benguela upwelling off southwestern Africa, where nutrient-rich waters fuel extraordinary productivity; and the Amazon River plume, where a massive pulse of terrestrial nutrients transforms the tropical Atlantic. Microbial genetic resources from such systems also hold promise for bioprospecting, offering genes of interest in fields ranging from medicine to environmental remediation. Yet the sequencing technologies needed to read this genetic treasure trove remain concentrated in a small number of high-income countries, echoing a long historical pattern in which maritime technology and economic power have been tightly linked.

Equipped with these figures, an international team of researchers led by Hugo Sarmento of the Universidade Federal de São Carlos in Brazil, together with colleagues from Argentina, South Africa, France and the AtlantECO project consortium, set out to quantify not only where ocean microbiome samples come from, but who leads the science and who receives the credit. Their conclusion is blunt: without deliberate intervention, ocean microbiome research will continue to reproduce geographic inequities inherited from centuries of northern maritime dominance. The team examined two of the southern hemisphere’s most celebrated oceanographic hotspots, the Benguela upwelling and the Amazon plume, and found that leading authorship in the published literature is dominated by institutions in northern hemisphere countries. More troubling still, more than half of the peer-reviewed articles on these regions involve no researchers affiliated with institutions in the countries bordering them at all.

This pattern has a name that has become infamous across the sciences: parachute research, sometimes called helicopter research. The term describes the practice in which scientists from wealthy nations travel to remote or biodiverse regions, collect samples or data, and publish the results without meaningful involvement of local researchers or consideration of local priorities. Studies of this practice in soil science, ecology, medicine and other fields have documented how it strips local scientists of leadership opportunities, excludes Indigenous and local knowledge that could sharpen scientific interpretation, and channels prestige and funding northward. In ocean microbiology, the consequences are concrete. Studies conducted in the Benguela upwelling region often omit researchers from Namibia, Angola or South Africa, the very nations whose coastlines frame the upwelling. Research on the Amazon plume, with direct implications for Brazilian conservation policy and debates over offshore oil drilling, frequently proceeds without Brazilian co-authors.

The article also highlights a subtler distortion of authorship norms. In Brazil, federal biodiversity law requires the involvement of Brazilian scientists as a compliance condition for obtaining permits to sample within national waters, under a mechanism called SisGen that regulates access to genetic resources and associated traditional knowledge. Although the law does not explicitly mandate co-authorship, international research groups frequently add local researchers to papers primarily to satisfy permit requirements rather than out of genuine partnership. The authors argue that such token inclusion is ethically questionable: it undermines authentic collaboration, fails to build real scientific capacity, and is difficult to detect, which complicates efforts by journals and funders to police equitable practice. Adding a name to a paper, they caution, is no substitute for involving local experts in setting research questions, designing studies and interpreting results.

One structural remedy the authors advocate, adapted from the international health research community, is the adoption of reflexivity statements. Under this mechanism, authors of internationally collaborative papers must explicitly document how local researchers were engaged in setting priorities, designing the study, collecting and analyzing data, and sharing credit and benefits. Journals, funding agencies and research consortia could require such statements, making the power dynamics within collaborations transparent and accountable. The authors stress that local expertise is not a courtesy but a scientific necessity: researchers who live near a sampling site know where, how and when to sample, and their involvement often yields deeper insights and more contextualized findings. They acknowledge a real tension, however, between global-scale synthesis projects, typically led from the global north, and place-based studies, such as fisheries management or water quality monitoring, that are often more urgent priorities in low- and middle-income countries. The most successful initiatives treat these approaches as complementary rather than competing.

The AtlantECO project, funded by the European Union under the All Atlantic Ocean Research Alliance framework, offers what the authors describe as a success story in bottom-up collaboration. Within the project, part of the Tara schooner’s Mission Microbiomes cruise sailed along the Atlantic coasts of South America and Africa, targeting the tropical, equatorial and southern ocean regions. All 168 sampling stations, yielding more than 25,000 samples, were located between latitudes 65 degrees south and 15 degrees north, and ten students and postdoctoral researchers from the global south joined the expedition. Research activities were organized as topical studies in specific oceanographic regions, where local and foreign researchers met virtually before the ship’s arrival to synthesize existing knowledge and identify the questions the mission should address. In the Amazon plume study, scientists from Brazil, Europe and the United States discussed both the plume’s potential role as a carbon sink hotspot and local Brazilian concerns about offshore oil drilling; six Brazilian students participated directly in that leg. The Benguela upwelling study united South African and Namibian scientists to investigate microbial community dynamics, nutrient upwelling, carbon fluxes and the oxygen depletion events that trigger mass mortality along the coast.

South-south collaboration is emerging as an equally vital complement to north-south partnerships. The South Atlantic Ocean Sampling Day initiative, an offshoot of a northern hemisphere campaign that originally had almost no sites in the global south, has expanded standardized microbiome sampling to more than 25 locations across South America, coordinated through a hub-and-node model linking research groups in Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Colombia and Chile. Participating institutions receive training and low-cost sampling kits, enabling molecular work in places where such tools were previously unavailable, while outreach events engage local schools and communities. Similarly, the Microsudaqua network now brings together more than 80 aquatic microbial ecologists from six South American countries, fostering joint publications, standardized protocols and training courses that have strengthened regional capacity and visibility. These networks, the authors argue, demonstrate that scientific integration does not require northern intermediaries and that durable, equitable research ecosystems can grow from within the south.

Yet the obstacles to scaling such successes remain formidable. Sampling permits for foreign research vessels operating in another country’s exclusive economic zone involve protracted negotiations with defense ministries and compliance with agreements such as the Nagoya Protocol. Sequencing costs are substantially higher in many low- and middle-income countries because of import taxes and limited infrastructure; notably, AtlantECO allocated ten percent of its total budget, half of its sequencing budget, to southern sequencing centers, with France’s Genoscope sharing protocols to ensure standardization. Article processing charges for open-access publishing, often reaching thousands of dollars, disproportionately exclude southern authors, and publisher waiver schemes cover only a small fraction of eligible countries. Southern representation also remains thin in major international policy frameworks, including the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, the UNFCCC and the high seas Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction agreement. The authors conclude that funders, institutions, journals and governments must co-invest in southern infrastructure, require reflexivity statements, reward equitable collaboration in performance evaluations, and support conferences and networks led from the global south. The ocean, they remind readers, is a global common; its microbial stewards should reflect all of humanity.

Subject of Research: Geographic inequity in ocean microbiome research and efforts to build equitable southern hemisphere participation

Article Title: The southern gap in ocean microbiome science

Article References: Sarmento, H., Huber, P., Santos-Júnior, C. D., Abreu, A., Makhalanyane, T. P., Karenyi, N., Rocke, E., AtlantECO project partners, Acinas, S. G., Amaral-Zettler, L., Araujo, M., Arboleda-Baena, C., Bachi, G., Bănaru, D., Becker, É. C., Bellacicco, M., Benedetti, F., Bowler, C., Buongiorno Nardelli, B., … Iudicone, D. (2025). The southern gap in ocean microbiome science. Ocean Microbiology, 1(1), Article 6. https://doi.org/10.1186/s44375-025-00006-w

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s44375-025-00006-w

Keywords: ocean microbiome, southern hemisphere, parachute science, equitable collaboration, metagenomics, Benguela upwelling, Amazon plume, AtlantECO, Tara Mission Microbiomes, science diplomacy, sequencing capacity, Global South research