CAROL STEPIEN: OK, I'm here today you have to bear with me again to talk about metagenomic studies for understanding biological community responses to physical and chemical oceanic conditions. My research team stand up please. And can we get to know them downstairs? I have a young dynamic team here and finally hearing them doing good things about our ecosystems. 

So Matt is going to be giving the tour downstairs. Beth is going to be presenter of posters. Larde is our undergraduate research. Chris is our NRC postdoc. Sean is a new postdoc through JISAO. And Emily is off to sea. I'll be a part time of day this is managing my crew. Now once upon a time when I was studying for my PhD research on Santa Catalina Island, I was sensing the ecology and evolutionary genetics of course fishes and looking at the invertebrate community. Never could I have imagined that today I could take a 1 liter sample of that water and tell you virtually everything that is in that water. So the invertebrates, the fishes, the microbes, et cetera. And it's been a really exciting to be working today with new NOAA on its strategy and helping to focus this research. 

So we were established in 2017 at PMEL, and we have-- we came out with my great [INAUDIBLE] money from the EPA and NSF. There's also equipment downstairs you'll see. And now we're funded by Washington's Sea Grant and then NOAA 'Omics program. So we offer new information for understanding our marine ecosystems. So we're discerning who is who in entire living communities, the diversity, and the responses. 

So in the near future, we're going to be coupling these biological communities assessments to physical and chemical oceanographic measurements in situ. This is the new horizon and this revolution is going on across the world and we hope to be on the forefront. So you can couple this with any of these remote sensing, acoustics, visual, video imaging, artificial intelligence, machine learning. And offers new ways to understand how about much communities are adopting and changing across time and space in our oceans. 

So as you probably know you are shedding key DNA right now. So you're leaving dust and your signature. We could sequence everybody in this room. Tell you a lot more than you can find out from ancestry.com or 23andMe. You can get your whole genome. We can tell who is in this room today. Where you're shedding and who was here yesterday and last week by the decay in the DNA. 

So organisms leave their DNA behind. It dissolves in water and the sediments. We can analyze its genetic code as often more sensitive and accurate than traditional sampling like shown in this study, et cetera. And so we can detect and identify the species in the ocean without disturbing them or their habitat. We no longer have to leave the trawlers. We can follow the whales and do this. So it's really, really important. We can discover new, rare and invasive species and also know who is who and what are the most [INAUDIBLE] doing and couple it with remote sampling. So what we do is we design parameters, we discern species of interest and run a diagnostic approach that's just qualitative qPCR.

So our laboratory specializes in DNA Metabarcording. So we develop now targeted analysis to tell you certain things about certain tests. But we also use more general ones which will show you some of the results of these. So this allows you to collect an environmental sample. It can be water. You extract the DNA, you amplify the DNA markers of interest. We do many of these in concert. We do high frequency sequencing, we take the individual samples. We can run about 100 at one time. We do bioinformatic processing and my team are masters at developing code they use, R and Python, and use a customized approach. We're working with laboratories across the nation, across the world to start to standardize this for federal agencies and researchers worldwide. We then identified the species in the mix and relate these to ecological parameters which of course is hard to differentiate which is which. 

So we offered the questions what species/taxa are present? How are they different across space and time and about life stages? And how are they responding to these changes over time? We have seven tested ecosystems. And getting a lot of time. So this just shows an example of Salish Sea. Beth is going to show us a poster. We've been working in concert with the morphologists obviously they're looking into physical and chemical parameters. 

So collecting both water and plankton samples, this shows a snapshot of what you get. This is a very good general marker. You get lots and lots of things, including pteropods just shown over here. [INAUDIBLE] snowy snailfish and look, it does look kind of showy there. Crab, red rock crab, barnacles and out of the blue are copepods. These samples are dominated by copepods. You could see differences among the sites and between the seasons. 

If you look at fish you get the same thing. So all the pink species here are different species of flat fishes. It's just you're seeing them the endemic of North-- There's a general population of North Pacific hake in the Salish Sea and it's really showing up here in this site 9. 

And we have to look at the poster for more detail. So we can take a focus on copepods. We see more of stability in copepods. A lot more in the spring, in the spring phytoplankton bloom that we see in the fall. And that fish are more ephemeral mostly we're getting ichthyoplankton in the sample. 

So to focus on the future, what are we doing? We have about nine cruises this summer, including the West Coast ocean acidification cruise. We're really excited about that. We are happy for that. We're newly focused. We're focusing on chemosynthetic communitues vents and seeps looking at how those plankton are changing with nothing in the water in concert with the EOI. We're putting out forth new auto samplers this year. 

So one is going in on Phyllis' mooring and two, the other one is going off the Olympic Coast National Marine Sanctuary in Cape Elizabeth and Chris Paight is going to deploy that, the postdoc who will be giving a poster. So Matt Galaska is a specialist in Red Sea. So he's focusing on pteropods, chemosynthetic plants, and copepods for this analysis. So he'll explain these downstairs. And so we're really excited about focusing in the future on developing this technology for real, near real-time biological communities assessments. And embracing this new technology and approaches to helping NOAA and our nations and world side. So thank you very much. 

[APPLAUSE]