The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) has received $5.2 million in 2012 from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundations Marine Microbiology Initiative, according to a press release. The money will fund three projects aimed at better understanding the complex role that marine microbes play in the ocean ecosystem and to better assess the oceans health and productivity.

Their work will look for answers to questions regarding the flow of nutrients through microbial food webswho eats and secretes what, where, and whenand the resulting biogeochemical transformations.

The support of the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation is critical to enabling a fundamental understanding of microbes contribution to ocean health and productivity, says WHOI President and Director Susan Avery. There is so much more to know about marine microbes genetic diversity, how they secure nutrients, what other organisms they interact with, and the biogeochemical changes they bring about in the ocean. These new projects will contribute toward the ultimate goal of a comprehensive understanding of marine microbial communities.

The funded projects at WHOI include:

The introduction of improved instrumentation for geochemical analysis and powerful new molecular biology techniques for studying genomes and gene and protein expression has given us new ways of looking at how microbes function in the marine environment, says Ajit Subramaniam, program director for the Marine Microbiology Initiative. With Moore Foundation support, we want to enable multidisciplinary teams of scientists to identify and quantify nutrient pools in the ocean, and decipher the genetic and biochemical bases of microbial metabolism.

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Woods Hole research projects awarded $5.2 million