Project: Microbial cycling of dissolved organic matter at Station ALOHA

Each year marine phytoplankton extract enormous quantities of carbon dioxide, nutrients, and minerals from the atmosphere and ocean to manufacture the proteins, carbohydrates, and lipids needed to sustain life. To achieve this, microbes continually reorganize elemental cycles in response to ever changing environmental conditions, yielding a diverse community of phyto- and bacterioplankton that are highly tuned to their environment. At the molecular level, this diversity and tuning is expressed as the community genome. Genes direct the synthesis of organic chemicals, and the enormous diversity we observe in microbial genomes is the source of an equally diverse suite of organic chemicals present in seawater. In collaboration with marine microbiologists, molecular biologists, and mathematical modelers, we work to understand how bioactive and nutrient dissolved organic matter impact ecosystem metabolism in the oligotrophic ocean as represented by the Station ALOHA study site.

Bio

Daniel Repeta is Senior Scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. He received his BS in Chemistry from the University of Rhode Island in 1977 and his Ph.D. in Chemical Oceanography from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution/Massachusetts Institute of Technology Joint Program in Chemical Oceanography in 1982. He was a National Institute of Health Postdoctoral Fellow in the Chemistry Department at Columbia University and an NSF/NATO Postdoctoral Fellow at the L'Institut du Chemie, in Strasbourg, France. He joined the chemistry department at Woods Hole in 1985 where he has been awarded the Stanley W. Watson Chair for Excellence in Oceanography.