TITLE: Associate Professor
ACADEMIC INSTITUTION: University of Delaware

 

What is your role in Extreme 2008?
I am one of the principal investigators of the Extreme 2008 expedition. I am thrilled to be leading an enthusiastic and energetic team of scientists who will be investigating the role of viruses at the deep-sea vents. 

About 18 months ago, my co-principal investigators Drs. Shannon Williamson and Craig Cary and I submitted a $1.2 M research proposal to the National Science Foundation (NSF)  to study viruses at the deep-sea hydrothermal vents. After six months of review at NSF, our proposal was among the few selected by the NSF-Microbial Genome Sequencing program for funding. This was our fifth attempt in three years to obtain funding for this work and throughout this time we continued to revise and improve our ideas and approaches.

Our persistence and belief in the importance of this work eventually paid off, and now we have the fortune of exploring a completely new area of science.

What questions are you trying to answer and why?
Earlier work conducted from 2001 to 2004 by Dr. Shannon Williamson, myself, and several others, discovered that viruses are abundant members of the microbial communities at the deep-sea hydrothermal vents. We also learned that many of the vent bacteria contained cryptic viruses that could be chemically coaxed to come out of the bacterial cells. Technological advancements and continuing cost reductions of DNA sequencing which have occurred since that early work now enable us to investigate the diversity of genes contained within abundant viral populations at the deep-sea vents.

Many scientific questions guide our work such as: How many different species of virus occur at the vents? What sort of genes do these viruses contain? Are these viral genes capable of changing the behavior of bacterial cells during viral infection? How do viral populations differ between deep-sea vent environments?

While these questions could be asked of any environment, they are especially applicable and important to understanding deep-sea hydrothermal vent environments, because bacteria form the basis of these ecosystems. Moreover, vent ecosystems are believed to resemble those environments from which life on Earth began. By closely examining microorganisms and viruses at the vents, we are, in effect, looking back in biological time at the closest ancestors to the first cells and viruses to occur on Earth.

Why is this research important? What are the benefits?
Work in the more accessible and benign environments of the coastal ocean has overwhelmingly demonstrated that natural viral populations contain the largest pool of unknown and novel genes on earth. One study estimated that viral populations of the Chesapeake Bay alone contain at least 120,000 unknown and novel genes. In contrast, the entire human genome is estimated to contain only 30,000 genes! It is likely that our work examining viral populations at the deep-sea vents will uncover tens of thousands of genes that are entirely new to science. Because viruses can control bacterial cells at the molecular level, it is possible that our basic discoveries of new genes will eventually lead to new technologies for controlling and manipulating bacteria that exist within the most challenging environments on Earth.

What's your background, and what lured you into marine science/education?
I probably knew from before I could walk that I wanted to be a marine scientist. I was born under the astrological sign of Pisces, the fish. According to my mother, as an infant I crawled into the neighborhood pool, sank to the bottom for a few terrifying seconds, and came out smiling and happy. At the age of nine, I was disappointed to learn that I had to wait six long years before I could become a certified diver. But, without a doubt, the life event that cemented my interest in marine science was my first visit to a Bahamian coral reef at the age of 15. Each summer for the succeeding seven years, I worked in the Florida Keys at a national Boy Scouts of America high adventure camp, known at the Florida Sea Base.

After finishing my undergraduate studies at Emory University, I never looked back at life in the burgeoning city of Atlanta, but headed off to St. Andrews University, Scotland, through the generous support of a Bobby Jones scholarship. As the official home of golf and the Gatty Marine lab, the University of St. Andrews offered me rich life experiences that I cherish to this day. Under the advisement of Dr. Ian Johnson, I completed an M.Sc. thesis studying the relationship between muscle proteins and temperature adaptations in fish. While I enjoyed my studies on the muscle physiology of fish, I knew that I wanted to pursue field-based research on the diversity and ecology of marine microorganisms.

This desire brought me to the laboratory of the world-renowned marine microbiologist, Rita R. Colwell at the University of Maryland. Just before coming to Dr. Colwell’s lab in the newly formed Center of Marine Biotechnology (COMB), the seminal 1989 paper by Bergh et al. reporting the astounding abundance of viruses in marine environments appeared in the journal, Nature. This discovery drove my dissertation research, and to this day, I continue to be fascinated by the astounding abundance, diversity, and ecological impact of viruses and viral infection within the microbial communities that sustain the biosphere.