Sargassum and marine health
#Caribbean #PuntaCana #MarineInnovationHub #Rutgers #Sargassum

Happy to be in Punta Cana, DR to work with our wonderful colleagues here at the Marine Innovation Hub on coral disease and resilience and the Sargassum problem.

In the field with @burnsajohn.bsky.social and @andrewilloughb.bsky.social. We found our first photosynthetic Paulinella cell of the day! Only took 4 hours to find 🥴. Now isolating this and the other few we’ve found since! Very very hard, tedious work but we are in good spirits.

Three hard-working undergraduate researchers in our lab, Jiayi, Daisy, and Shriya, present their work and accomplishments (see bhattacharyalab.com). Congratulations to all three for successful project completion and to Erin, Kasey, Gabby and other lab members for their supervisory skills.

Congratulations to Erin Chille, Tim Stephens, and other members of our coral team for this paper about how multi-omics research powered tool development can aid reef conservation (onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....).

Some highlights from today’s protest in Princeton, ft. my mom and @bhattacharyalab.bsky.social. Every sign was so different because there are one million bizarre and illegal things going on at the same time. Truly crazy era we are in.

Great science persists. See the work by Julia Van Etten (@couchmicroscopy.bsky.social) that uncovered ongoing gene transfers in an extremophilic microbial community at Yellowstone National Park. Kudos to her and co-author Tim Stephens (enviromicro-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....).

After a very cold morning the day warmed up around midday… good for a walk in the fresh snow.

Congratulations to our great team led by Tim Stephens and Julia Van Etten for publishing this wonderful paper about how microalgae and microbes interact at Yellowstone National Park to maintain stable ecosystems.(academic.oup.com/ismecommun/a...). @couchmicroscopy.bsky.social @apmweber.bsky.social

Holding up a Sargassum “bioproduct” in Cliff Louime’s lab. This project is ready to take off as the waste seaweed piles up in Spring.

Lovely to be in Puerto Rico talking seaweeds and corals with Cliff Louime and colleagues at UPR.

Can an ecological disaster be harnessed for good? This is our goal in collaborative work funded by Schmidt Sciences to turn enormous amounts of waste Sargassum seaweed, shown here on a Caribbean beach, into useful bioproducts (sebsnjaesnews.rutgers.edu/2024/09/sebs...).

This rather unimpressive outflow channel from Dragon Spring, Yellowstone National Park holds clues to how early cells on our planet interacted with each other. We study how the green cells (actually red algae) shown here build biofilms and share or compete for resources with prokaryotes.

Here is an artistic rendering of corals off Magnetic Island near Townsville, Australia which is part of the Great Barrier Reef region. We work with partners at the Australian Institute of Marine Science (www.aims.gov.au) to understand coral biology, reproduction, and their stress responses.

No day is complete without spending quality time with our beloved Bucky. He is gentle and attentive at home but a wild one in nature, which keeps us all fit. Thanks B-man!

Thrilled to do my first post on Bluesky. Our lab has a major interest in marine genomics research with the goal of aiding conservation. This image is of a Caribbean coral that we are studying with collaborators in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic.