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 White House's 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
The Phycological Society of America’s (PSA) joint meeting with the International Society of Protistology (ISOP) and International Society for Evolutionary Protistology (ISEP) brought together algae, phytoplankton and protist researchers from across the globe. During the meeting, research from carbon dioxide draw-down with kelp... 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