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
Over 62 scientists from PMEL, including researchers from NOAA’s Cooperative Institutes and the University of Washington's Cooperative Institute for Climate, Ocean, & Ecosystem Studies (CICOES) and Oregon State University's Cooperative Institute for Marine Resources Studies (CIMRS) attended the Ocean Sciences Meeting in New Orleans from February 18-23. The 2024 Ocean Sciences Meeting served as a conference that unified the ocean community and brought researchers together to share findings, make connections, and advance science. Five members of the Ocean Molecular Ecology group were in attendance.
Sean McAllister presented results from the 2021 West Coast Ocean Acidification (WCOA) Cruise, which was in collaboration with... more
Feature Publication
Environmental DNA (eDNA) metabarcoding has become a widely used, non-invasive tool to assess the biodiversity of marine systems. The sampling methodology relies on curated reference databases (i.e., a library of organismal sequences). While some well-known species possess full mitochondrial genome references, most only have representatives from one or a few mitochondrial genes in these databases, or no reference sequences at all, which limits the accuracy of eDNA as a tool for biodiversity monitoring. Our group (OME) is actively working to fill in the gaps to improve species identification and as a result our monitoring efforts.
The amphipod Cyphocaris challengeri is a globally distributed, highly abundant species that plays an important role in the pelagic food web. Before this study, there were no mitochondrial genomes for the Family... more