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Using The (Atomic) Force

Working under a grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation, Malfatti and Azam collaborate with scientists from Italy, Slovenia, and Croatia. Major mucilage events impact the coastlines of all three countries. Malfatti, a graduate of Italy's University of Trieste in microbiology, also was a researcher at the Marine Biology Laboratory, today part of the Italian National Institute of Oceanography and Experimental Geophysics in Trieste.

Malfatti is studying samples of seawater taken from the coastlines of Italy, Slovenia, and Croatia to determine under controlled conditions in the laboratory how bacteria and microgels interact. She is the first to use atomic force microscopy, a very high-resolution type of scanning-probe microscope with nanometer-scale resolution, to study the interactions between bacteria and microgels. Individual bacteria can be 600-1,000 nanometers in size while microgels, the smallest particles in the ocean, can be as small as 10 nanometers.

Discovering the cause of mucilage events in the Adriatic does not mean a solution will follow soon.

“Like the greenhouse effect, we need to understand how something works first before we can know if anything can be done about it,” Malfatti said. “But mucilage has been in these waters for a long time. It could be an important part of the ecosystem. It may be an over-accumulation of organic matter in the marine carbon cycle of the Adriatic Sea that is variable in time and space, and we just need to better understand it.”

Next page: A living laboratory portends the fate of the oceans

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