Snapshot
| Outcome: | To discover important new knowledge about the distribution, function and ecological role of marine microbes, single celled organisms that live in saline waters, and their role in the overall health of oceans and climates. |
| Geography: | Worldwide |
| Strategies: | - Expand the field of research by funding support of research and related costs for Foundation Investigators in Marine Microbiology
- Support the development of tools and resources to the marine microbiology community to accelerate the rate of research in the field
- Stimulate new collaborations among scientists from disparate fields and the creation of multidisciplinary research teams or centers
- Fund the development and application of novel genomic technologies and instrumentation
- Support a limited number of large, high-impact research projects that will affect ocean science as a whole.
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Initiative Overview
Oceans cover 71 percent of Earth’s surface and regulate our weather, climate, and atmosphere composition. The oceans sustain a very large portion of the planet’s biodiversity and are substantial sources of our living and nonliving resources.
Despite the central importance of the oceans to the health and commerce of the planet, large segments of the oceans are unexplored and many of their basic biological and chemical processes are unrecognized or not understood. Furthermore, unprecedented stresses placed on the ocean system have direct impact on the ocean’s physical, chemical, and biological properties. Although we increasingly perceive the critical role of ocean processes in the functioning of basic Earth systems, our knowledge about those processes is extremely limited. However, new research techniques are revealing critical insights into how oceans shape the conditions and opportunities for life on our planet. In the long term, a better understanding of the role of microorganisms in the ocean ecosystem may be used to monitor the overall health of oceans and climates.
In less than 10 years after incorporating a variety of modern molecular tools, the field of marine microbiology has made amazing progress through the genomic and metagenomic analysis of marine microbial communities. Ecosystem models are beginning to incorporate microbial processes in biogeochemical cycles. However, marine microbiology still remains a methods-limited field, short on tools and resources, commonly borrowing from other fields.
Funding research and related costs for the Foundation’s Investigators in Marine Microbiology provides a base for training a new generation of marine microbiologists to build knowledge for growth and expansion of the field. For more information, see GBMF Investigators in Marine Microbiology.
Providing the appropriate tools and resources to the marine microbiology community will help accelerate the rate of research in the field. These new tools and resources include: large-scale DNA sequencing and assembly to examine specific genes using DNA probes and PCR (polymerase chain reaction, a tool for amplification of specific genes); cloning large segments of microbial genomes that do not grow in traditional culture; and visualization of specific genes by fluorescent tagging. These genomic tools were derived from the genetic revolution in biomedical science and have been rapidly deployed in marine microbiology. An example of the power of large-scale sequencing and assembly is the recent recognition that, of approximately 1,000 new bacterial species discovered in the Sargasso Sea, 850 have physiologies that include capturing light, using rhodopsin as a photon receptor. Prior to this discovery made from Foundation-funded grants, the conventional belief was that most ocean bacteria were not photosynthetic and chlorophyll was the major light capturing system. The fact that 85 percent of the newly discovered bacterial species are photoactive is a far greater proportion than ever imagined.