Prestigious award provides funding to pursue research on fundamental problems in Aquatic Microbial Ecology and Evolution.
Reporting by Helen Hill for CBIOMES
It was recently announced that Greg Britten, a long-time member of CBIOMES, has been awarded one of six 2025 Simons Early Career Investigator in Aquatic Microbial Ecology and Evolution Awards.
The proposed project, titled “Bayesian Machine Learning for Ecological Data Assimilation of Marine Microbial Communities,” aims to develop a novel modeling framework—Marine-MDSINE—to infer the dynamics of marine microbiomes. Building on recent advances in medical microbiome modeling, the project adapts Bayesian machine learning techniques to the unique data structures and ecological complexities of marine environments.
The research will begin with simulation-estimation experiments to validate the pipeline’s ability to recover known parameters and determine data requirements. Once established, the framework will be applied to high-resolution geochemical and genomic time series collected from two hypoxic saltwater ponds on Cape Cod: Siders Pond and Salt Pond. These sites offer contrasting oxygen regimes, enabling comparative analysis of microbial nitrogen cycling under varying hypoxic conditions.
The Marine-MDSINE pipeline integrates generalized Lotka-Volterra equations with genomically informed clustering and geochemical variables, allowing for interpretable inference of microbial community structure and function. Experimental incubations will complement in-situ observations, providing a multidimensional dataset for model calibration and hypothesis testing.
Ultimately, this project will advance methodological tools in marine microbial ecology, contribute to understanding nitrogen cycling in hypoxic environments, and lay the groundwork for a long-term microbial observatory on Cape Cod.
Story image: Bror Jönsson (right) sharing his research during a CBIOMES Annual Meeting poster session – image credit: The Simons Foundation.