National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration
United States Department of Commerce

The U.S. government is closed. This site will not be updated; however, NOAA websites and social media channels necessary to protect lives and property will be maintained. To learn more, visit commerce.gov.

For the latest forecasts and critical weather information, visit weather.gov.


Deck of the RV Storm Petrel before the deployment of an automonous eDNA sampler in the Olympic Coast National Marine Sanctuary
Macroinvertebrate specimen in jars on the lab counter
NOAA Oscar Dyson departing from Unalaska, Alaska
Underwater view of a kelp forest
Sunflower star on the ocean floor off California

PMEL's Ocean Molecular Ecology (OME) program uses 'Omics tools to tackle global ocean issues. We help lead the implementation of the NOAA 'Omics strategy and the National Aquatic eDNA Strategy to advance NOAA's mission of science and stewardship. We seek to leverage advances in molecular biology to scale biological analyses with physical and chemical processes. Our science aims to characterize the impacts of warming, ocean acidification, and hypoxia on marine life. This allows for characterization of marine ecosystems as they respond to a changing climate.

OME work directly supports NOAA's core missions in numerous ways

  • Understand and predict Earth systems by characterizing climate impacts on marine biodiversity.
  • Develop technology to improve NOAA science, service, and stewardship by advancing 'Omics approaches.
  • Transition results so they are useful to society - we do this by creating open access data dissemination, bioinformatic software, and genetic resources.
  • Provide stewardship and maintain sustainability of the Nation's living marine resources, their habitats, interactions, and ecosystems by generating critical biodiversity information that is foundational for climate resilient ecosystem based fisheries management.

NOAA 'Omics Website
PMEL Ocean Molecular Ecology Technical Portal
NOAA 'Omics Technical Portal

What's Happening

Multiple rows of shelves, filled with numerous clear glass jars. The jars contain various specimens and are organized in a museum collection.

The collections with formalin-fixed samples at Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. Credit: Shannon Brown

September 18, 2025

My name is Ryan Moinazad, and this summer I had the incredible opportunity to join NOAA’s Ocean Molecular Ecology group as an undergraduate research volunteer. I’m a rising sophomore at the University of Southern California, double majoring in Biological Sciences and Legal Studies, and I also assist with research at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County (NHMLAC). My summer project, a continuation of my work at NHMLAC, focused on a long-standing challenge in science: how to get usable DNA out of specimens preserved in formalin. 

Formalin, a diluted form of formaldehyde, has been widely used for specimen preservation because of how well it preserves their shape and form. Museum collections across the world have historically used formalin to preserve samples. The tradeoff is that while formalin preserves the... more