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

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

September 24, 2024

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