National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration
United States Department of Commerce
Salish Sea Sunset
Sampling plankton on the Rachel Carson

PMEL Ocean Molecular Ecology group seeks to leverage the advances in molecular biology to scale biological analyses with physical and chemical processes and allow for characterization of marine ecosystems response to climate change. We strive to achieve this objective through our science aimed at characterizing the impacts of warming, ocean acidification, and hypoxia on biological communities and organisms. We support our strategic science goal through efforts to modernize ecosystem assessments through ‘Omics tools, improve ‘Omics tools to advance NOAA mission objectives, and help lead the NOAA ‘Omics strategy.

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

  • to understand and predict the Earth system by characterizing climate impacts on marine biodiversity
  • develop technology to improve NOAA science, service, and stewardship by advancing ‘Omics approaches
  • transition the results so they are useful to society 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.

What's Happening

Nick Silverson on the deck of the Sir Wilfrid Laurier Coast Guard Vessel
February 26, 2024

My name is Nicholas Silverson, and I am a master’s student at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science. My research, funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) INTERN program and Graduate Research Fellowship (GRF), as well as the Distributed Biological Observatory (DBO), focuses on the biodiversity, community, and population structure of ocean floor animals (benthic macrofauna) in the Pacific Arctic. As part of my project, I visited NOAA PMEL and worked alongside Matthew Galaska, a principal investigator in the PMEL Ocean Molecular Ecology (OME) group, to incorporate a genomics approach to questions of biodiversity and population structure. 

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