Proteomic insights into cellular foundations of marine ecosystems

Investigator: Erin Bertrand, Dalhousie

Marine microbes are the foundation of most marine ecosystems and play critical roles in the ocean’s response to climate change. However, we still lack basic information about how these microbes use available resources to grow, and how that resource use changes as their environment changes. Without this information, we are limited in our ability to predict how the growth of marine microbes will change in the future, and what the consequences of those changes will be for ocean chemistry and biology. To address this, we will make measurements of the proteins marine microbes produce when they grow under different conditions. Proteins give us a unique window into how those microbes grow because they account for a large portion of cellular resources, and they also encode information that tells us about which microbe made them and what they might be used for. We will combine these protein measurements, made in the ocean, with various types of numerical models, to improve our understanding of resource use during marine microbial growth and its consequences for ocean processes.

CBIOMES Collaborators in Bertrand’s Group

News from the Bertrand Group