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Tiny Worlds Play a Global Role

For Farooq Azam, the mucilage project in the northern Adriatic Sea may speak volumes about the oceans despite its very specific geographic focus.

And the atomic force microscope will be a crucial tool that helps the scientists acquire their global view. Obtained with financial support from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, it allows the researchers to zoom in and “feel” the architecture of molecular structures. Another instrument, called a laser confocal microscope, uses lasers to produce high-resolution three-dimensional pictures of the microscopic world in which microbes live and interact.

“These new instruments are really bringing us closer to studying the ecology of microbes as you would study the ecology of larger organisms-animals, plants with which we are more familiar,” said Azam. “We are now beginning to acquire insights on these organisms where the environment itself is also viewed. So what we really want to do is see the architecture of the microscopic world in which microbes live.”

Such novel instruments are becoming more vital as scientists push to gain a deeper understanding of life and processes at the microscopic scale, according to Azam, especially as societies pay more attention to the role of marine life in the carbon cycle and how organisms respond to global warming.

Indeed, Azam said, microbial ecologists are increasingly focusing on whether the structure of the ocean at its most minuscule scales might be disrupted by climate change, and whether it could be modified by the ocean's rising acidification due to increases in carbon dioxide.

To answer one regionally specific question, the northern Adriatic research will give the team a means for investigating why the gels are not degraded as in other areas. It's possible that the Po River and its influx of nitrogen and phosphorous into the northern Adriatic may be behind the mucus blooms. Why isn't the organic matter within the mucus decomposing as quickly as it might elsewhere? Malfatti and Azam think that peculiar environmental conditions in the northern Adriatic Sea cause the production and accumulation of slow-to-degrade dissolved organic matter which may be left over from persistent blooms of algae supported by the nutrient load from the Po River. Future research will provide more answers.

But Azam sees the project providing much more than that. He views the accumulation and persistence of gels in the northern Adriatic as a model system, and the northern Adriatic as a living laboratory to investigate questions of disturbance of the ocean's carbon cycle due to human activities on a much larger scale.

“The northern Adriatic Sea gives us the opportunity to address questions about how the carbon cycle in the ocean may, under certain conditions, be disrupted to create conditions similar to the northern Adriatic,” said Azam. “The gels are huge accumulations of organic matter that is carbon rich. So with enormous amounts of carbon being accumulated the question becomes: Could it be that other areas of the ocean-due to human activity that we are now exerting-may actually become like the northern Adriatic Sea, because of disruption of the carbon cycle?”

Answers to these and other questions, he believes, will come-one microscopic step at a time.

- Mario C. Aguilera contributed to this story

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