CURE-ing microbes on ocean plastic

I was excited to learn today that our proposal CURE-ing microbes on ocean plastic, led by collaborators Ana Barral and Rachel Simmons at National University, was just funded by the National Science Foundation through the Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSI) program.  The Bowman Lab will play a small but important role in this project and it should be quite a bit of fun.  As a private, non-profit college National University is a somewhat unusual organization that serves a very different demographic than UC San Diego.  A large number of the students at National University are non-traditional, meaning that they aren’t going straight to college from high school.  A significant number are veterans, and National University is classified as an HSI.  So working with National University is a great opportunity to interact with a very different student body.

For this project Ana and Rachel developed a course-based undergraduate research experience (CURE) around the topic of ocean plastics.  This is an issue that is getting quite a bit of attention in the popular press, but has largely fallen through the cracks as far as research goes, possibly because it’s too applied for NSF and to basic (and expensive) for NOAA.  A lot of somewhat dubious work is going on in the fringe around the theme of cleaning up marine plastics, but we lack a basic understanding of the processes controlling the decomposition of plastics, and their entry into marine foodwebs (topics that do less to stoke the donor fires than clean up).  This CURE is a way to get students (and us) thinking about the science of marine plastics, specifically the colonization and degradation of plastics by marine microbes, while learning basic microbiology, molecular biology, and bioinformatic techniques.  The basic idea is to have the students deploy plastic colonization experiments in the coastal marine environment, isolate potential plastic degraders, sequence genomes, and carry out microbial community structure analysis.  Different courses will target different stages in the project, and students taking the right sequence of courses could be hands-on from start to finish.

Our role in the project is to provide the marine microbiology expertise.  Lab members will have an opportunity to give lectures and provide mentoring to National University students, and we’ll handle the deployment and recovery of plastic-colonization experiments on the SIO Pier (yay, more diving!).  We’ll also play a role in analyzing and publishing the data from these experiments.  Many thanks to lab alumnus Emelia DeForce (formerly with MoBio and now with Fisher Scientific) for bringing us all together on this project!