Which way will we be doing things? I’ll give some details on that in a moment. First, with less than 72 hours until we depart for Christchurch, NZ, we’ve gained a new member of our expedition; Flat Stanley. Flat Stanley joins us from Mrs. Garrigues 2nd grade class at Methow Valley Elementary. He is, reportedly, a bit of a show off and will probably manage to work his way into a number of photos. However with the amount of work we have planned we are happy for the extra help!
On the surface our project seems pretty straightforward, and it is. Collect samples of marine water, young sea ice, frost flowers, mature sea ice, and similar environments and analyze what DNA, RNA, and proteins are contained within the microbial community. The DNA sequences tell us which bacteria are present and what metabolic processes they are capable of. The RNA sequences tell us which metabolic processes they are currently using (genes are transcribed into messenger RNA which is translated into proteins and then quickly destroyed by special enzymes called ribonucleases). The protein sequences extend this concept further, telling us exactly which enzymes are present and active within the environment. In this study we are focusing on extracellular enzymes which play a crucial role in polar carbon cycling and other processes.
The challenging part is that each of these analyses requires a substantial number of microbial cells and therefor a substantial amount of sea ice. We anticipate needing to sample up to 800 kg (~1700 lbs) of ice from some of our sites. To prevent changes to the microbial community before analysis all of this ice has to be carefully melted into a high salinity brine near the freezing point, a very time consuming process. Once melted each samples must be filtered to concentrate the cells from the liquid, a process which takes many hours. I’ll be talking more about exactly why and how we do this once we get some samples to melt! It’s time to start packing and making the final preparations to head south…
One more items of interest, the journal Science ran an article on the icebreaker situation in Antarctica that can be found here (any educators that do not have access to this journal but would like a copy of this or any other publication cited on this blog can email me).
