Project: The Effect of Methane on Microbial Community Distributions in the Ulleung Basin

The DEBI/C-DEBI research exchange gave me the opportunity to travel to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) to work with Dr. Eoin Brodie. While at LBNL, I was able to learn and adopt a new microarray technology for subseafloor microbial ecology investigations. The PhyloChip is a microarray that contains probes for Bacterial and Archaeal 16s rRNA genes and uses parallel hybridization to minimizes the influence of dominant organisms; therefore, it is highly sensitive to rare microbes. In addition, to this data the research exchange provided necessary funding for me to finish my dissertation. The research exchange funds allowed two sites in the Ulleung Basin to be fully analyzed and incorporated into my dissertation “Geomicrobiology of sediment containing methane”. This collaboration also introduced me to how research is conducted at a national laboratory. This information is valuable in deciding my future career path. Whatever that path may be the collaboration and techniques that I learned will continue beyond graduate school, as we are planning future studies using the PhyloChip. For more on this method, see Briggs, Pohlman, Torres, Reidel, Brodie and Colwell’s 2011 AEM paper Macroscopic biofilms in fracture-dominated sediment that anaerobically oxidize methane.