Broadening the 'SCOPE' of microbial oceanography
The Simons Foundation, a New York-based philanthropic organization that supports a range of basic science research, has made its first venture into microbial oceanography with a $40 million award to fund the creation of the Simons Collaboration on Ocean Processes and Ecology (SCOPE), a five-year program centered at the University of Hawaii at Manoa to study the role of microscopic organisms in the ocean ecosystem. Marine bacteria and phytoplankton, which inhabit every drop of seawater, essentially dominate the ocean ecosystem — so much so that some say that they are the ocean. Microbes manufacture oxygen from sunlight, regulate the cycling of nutrients, and produce and consume greenhouse gases, with enormous implications for the ocean, and the entire planet. SCOPE gives the field’s top researchers new ability to apply advanced genomics and systems-biology approaches to go after the most elusive details in the ocean biome — such as how the trillions of microbes living...