TITLE: Graduate Student
ACADEMIC INSTITUTION: University of Southern California

What is your role in Extreme 2008?
I will be assisting in collecting, observing, preserving, and processing samples collected from the deep sea.  I’ve spent most of my graduate student career using molecular approaches for approaching microbial ecological questions, which will be a large component of processing the samples that we will collect at and near hydrothermal vent systems.

What questions are you trying to answer and why?
The deep sea in general is very under explored.  In that respect, this is a very exciting project to be working on!  We want to uncover the diversity of protists that live in these extreme environments using both culture-independent molecular applications and more traditional approaches such as microscopy.

What are molecular applications?
Molecular applications involve targeting a specific region of a gene that will provide us with some taxonomic information about the types of organisms at our study sites. This region of the gene is very well conserved, meaning that we can theoretically target all the organisms of interest using a single approach, but there are some parts of the gene that are variable and distinct across different taxonomic groups that will provide us with information about the diversity present.

What will you actually be doing in the lab?
We will be gently filtering the water that we collect through a glass fiber filter with a small pore size (0.7 microns) in order to catch all the protistan cells on the filter.  We will then take that filter and extract the DNA from all the cells caught on that filter, isolate the DNA and the particular gene of interest, and sequence it. This provides us with not only taxonomic information, but relative abundances as represented by the number of sequences we get back. We will be augmenting the molecular work with microscopy and culturing efforts.

How do you collect your samples of protists?
We will be using the bio boxes to collect macroorganisms, such as Riftia and mussels, to look for protists that may be living in close association with the larger organisms.  Last year, we saw many patches of dead Riftia and Tevnia at 9N due to the recent eruptions, which was perfect for us because these areas were potentially ideal feeding sites for protozoans.  We used the Slurper to collect these samples.  We will also be taking cores at Guaymas Basin at and near bacterial mats, as these areas would also be perfect meal locations for protozoans that graze on bacteria. The Sipper will be used to take water samples at and near hydrothermal vents for physical and chemical analyses. There is an ARTY chamber that will be filled with RNALater, which preserves RNA, in order to look at the RNA component. We also built protist traps that we deployed last year that we will pick up on this cruise. These traps are just sponges sitting in a thick polycarbonate tube, with both ends wrapped in a 200-micron mesh net so as to keep larger organisms out.  We put some organic nutrients in some of these traps, and we're hoping that as biomass of bacteria built up in these traps over time, that protists will have moved in to graze on them.  We will be using Alvin's arms to pick these up.  

Why is this research important? What are the benefits?
Protists are integral components of nearly every marine environment. They play a multitude of vital functional roles that can impact other parts of the ecosystem. However, we have a very limited understanding of protistan diversity and the functional properties of these assemblages at and near hydrothermal vent systems. This research will provide more insight on the taxonomic identities, abundances, and ecological roles of protists found in these extreme environments.   

What's your background, and what lured you into marine science/education?
I received my B.S. in biology at the University of Southern California. I thought that I wanted to become a pharmacist early on in my undergraduate years, but working in various sectors of the pharmaceutical industry helped me realize that I did not want to pursue that career path after all. 

So I began searching for another avenue to take and found it soon after I took a microbiology course. I enjoyed the course so much that I began working in an environmental microbiology lab on campus and enrolled in a study-abroad semester that was heavily focused on environmental microbiology on Catalina Island at USC’s Wrigley Marine Science Center (WMSC). 

During my semester on Catalina, I was exposed to intensive field work and lab work, which gave me a good sense of what to expect in graduate school. I enjoyed the field work and research so much that I decided to pursue my doctorate degree in environmental microbiology.  WMSC also served as a great portal for meeting other scientists and students, many of whom helped guide my decision to where I am today, including my adviser, Dave Caron. 

After talking to Dave about the research his lab was involved in and the opportunities available (like this deep-sea research cruise!), I jumped on board. So here I am, still at USC, starting my third year of graduate school in the Marine Environmental Biology department!