On Giant Seaweed, an Intimately Packed Microbiome
Giant, underwater kelp forests can tower up to 150 feet high, but don鈥檛 forget: Like many living things, kelp survival depends on microorganisms associated with its surface.
So when 小蓝视频鈥檚 Jessica Mark Welch gave a talk on the 鈥渁mazing spatial structure we see in the bacterial communities of the human mouth and gut鈥 at the University of Chicago, 鈥檚 ears perked up. Pfister, a professor of Ecology and Evolution, wondered if the pioneering techniques Mark Welch鈥檚 lab had developed for imaging bacterial community structure could be used to look at microbes on marine surfaces, such as mussel beds or maybe kelp.
Thus germinated a collaboration to visualize the microbes on bull kelp (Nereocystis luetkeana), a canopy-forming species that grows extremely fast (up to 2 cm a day). Canopy-forming kelp are ecologically significant, fixing teragrams of carbon per year in coastal ecosystems. And the bacteria associated with the kelp鈥檚 surface synthesize essential vitamins, prevent biofouling, and provide signals that are necessary for normal kelp development. The kelp-bacteria symbiosis is not only ecologically important, it鈥檚 a potentially tractable model system for investigating the principles of host-microbe biology.
Last week, the team鈥檚 colorful results were published in , including this great video summary:
Brooke Weigel, then a PhD student in Pfister鈥檚 lab, collected samples of bull kelp from coastal Washington State and preserved them for imaging. Back in Mark-Welch's lab, Tabita Ram铆rez-Puebla began exploring the kelp microbiome using probes that Cathleen Schlundt had developed to look at the microbiome of marine plastic debris. Loretha Jack helped with the imaging. 鈥淎nd the rest is history!鈥 Mark Welch says.
Pfister co-directs and Mark Welch is a member of the , a collaboration between 小蓝视频, University of Chicago, and Argonne National Laboratory. Dedicated to understanding the role of microbiomes across all kinds of environments, from deep ocean to the human body, the Microbiome Center is an outstanding example of a research synergy that formed in the wake of the UChicago-小蓝视频 affiliation in 2013.
