Project: Metabolic Currencies of the Ocean Carbon Cycle

NSF Award Abstract:
The roles of microbes in cycling carbon and nutrients in the ocean - the largest biological system on Earth - were initially described about 40 years ago. Now, it is known that half of Earth's primary production is carried out by marine phytoplankton, and half of that is recycled within weeks by marine bacteria. This proposal is a collaboration between microbiologists and chemists to identify the specific compounds that pass between phytoplankton and bacteria in surface ocean waters. Identifying the key chemicals of the ocean's microbial food web will provide insights into how the marine carbon cycle is regulated, generate data to improve ocean carbon models, and train new scientists at the interface of microbiology and chemistry. Hands-on learning opportunities in microbial ecology will be provided for high school students, both in the classroom and in marine ecosystems of the Georgia coast.

Phytoplankton metabolites that sustain the flow of carbon between microbial autotrophs and heterotrophs in the surface ocean carbon cycle will be identified in this project. A matrix of model systems consisting of bacteria-phytoplankton co-cultures will be used as biological assays for key metabolites based on expression patterns of bacterial transporter genes. The chemical identity of candidate metabolites and evaluation of their potential ecological role will be carried out by exometabolomic analysis of co-cultures with bacterial transporter mutants. Both advanced mass spectrometry and NMR will be used for metabolomics analysis, taking advantage of the sensitivity and compound identification strengths of each. The distribution of candidate metabolites in the ocean microbiome and other microbial systems will be characterized by mining environmental sequence datasets for orthologous transporter genes. This project represents a novel approach to identifying metabolites important in microbiome function, compounds often difficult to address with standard chemical approaches because of their low concentrations and high biological demand.