Sea science researchers
turn focus to microbesHawaii might take a crucial role in
a study of marine life genetics
Hawaii will figure prominently in a venture by human genome researcher J. Craig Venter to develop the genetic makeup of the ocean, according to David Karl, a University of Hawaii marine biologist.
Karl is one of 11 scientists on an advisory panel for a global expedition by Venter to sample ocean microbes.
"This is a whole new way of looking at life anywhere, but in this particular case, life in the ocean," Karl said.
The Sorcerer, Venter's private sailboat, is completing sampling in the Galapagos Islands and will come to Hawaii and travel through the Pacific back to the Atlantic.
"Independent of that, they're coming out here, using our research vessels and going to Station Aloha," Karl said. Station Aloha is a research site 60 miles north of Oahu.
Karl and his colleagues are awaiting word from the National Science Foundation on a $20 million proposal to establish a UH Center for Microbial Oceanography.
"What Venter is doing fits directly into this," Karl said, noting the programs would complement each other.
Karl, who heads the Laboratory for Microbiological Oceanography in the School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology, said the foundation received about 164 preliminary proposals for funding, and UH was one of 35 invited to submit full proposals.
Eight will be funded, with an announcement expected this month, he said. "It would be a real catch for UH."
The field site would be Station Aloha, focus of 16 years of monthly investigations.
The Polynesian Voyaging Society and some schools would be affiliated in a public outreach component, Karl said.
Venter, president of the Institute for Biological Energy Alternatives in Rockville, Md., announced results March 4 from his expedition in the Sargasso Sea. A paper on the project appears in April's Science magazine.
Venter's team identified more than 1.2 million new genes in water samples of the microbe populations, and about 80 percent were new to biology, Karl said.
He said the technique Venter used is called "shotgun sequencing" because the water samples are filtered to collect cells and extract the DNA, and "you don't really know what you're sequencing.
"Some scientists say, 'That's crazy, you don't even know what you're looking at.' He said, 'We're going to sequence whatever is there.'"
"He also found at least 1,000 new organisms or more waiting for us to isolate and figure out what they do," Karl said, "and this is just the tip of the iceberg -- one sample from one site from one ocean."
It was the most expensive analysis ever done, with more than $10 million invested in a single sample, he said.
He said Venter has received about $4 billion for environmental genomics from the U.S. Department of Energy and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.
Scientists thought they knew all there was to know about the ocean about 20 years ago, Karl said. That began to change in 1988 with multiple findings of new types of microscopic life at Station Aloha.
The ocean is a vast habitat that largely controls Earth's climate, "and habitability of life on the planet derives from the ocean," Karl said, "yet we know only very sketchy outlines even after studying it 100 years."
Genomic information is the first step to gaining a fundamental understanding of how the ocean system works, he said. "The next step is, What are they (microbes) doing?"
Experiments are needed to test hypotheses about how the ocean behaves and how it will respond to changes, he said.
"It's a very complicated world we live in," Karl said, "which is why it's such a difficult time trying to answer politicians on what happens to the earth if there is (global) warming by 1 degree."