PROTECT investigator Ferdi Hellweger‘s work was recently published in the journal Science. In collaboration with his graduate student, Neil Frederick, and Erik van Sebille from the University of New South Wales, Australia, Professor Hellweger quantified the role of neutral processes by simulating division, mutation, and death of some 100,000 individual marine bacteria cells with full genomes in a global surface ocean circulation model. They ran the model for up to 100,000 years and then analyzed the output using advanced DNA alignment algorithms. They found that microbes evolve faster than the ocean circulation can disperse them, leading to substantial—and dynamic— biogeographic patterns in their surface ocean population. Furthermore, these findings shed light on how ocean microbes may respond to global climate change. For PROTECT, Professor Hellweger supports Data Management and Modeling Core by overseeing all hydrological and water distribution modeling activities.
Read more about Professor Hellweger’s work here. The scientific abstract can be found here.
Source: news@Northeastern