Covering over 70% of the Earth’s surface, water is a fundamental resource for human survival. Oceans provide critical ecosystem services, including food provision, energy resources, and freshwater through the hydrological cycle, underscoring their essential role in sustaining human populations. However, anthropogenic pressures such as pollution and overfishing have significantly degraded marine environments. Contaminant influx and ocean acidification now pose substantial threats to aquatic health and biodiversity, compromising the resilience and functionality of marine ecosystems.
Microbes offer a promising solution in their ability to breakdown contamination from oil spills and plastics. Exploring the microbiomes of these underwater environments is vital to better understand these complex underwater communities which are essential to our planet. Applied microbiologists can play a significant part in understanding biodiversity, contributing to solutions, and encouraging stewardship with the aim of protecting our oceans for now and for future generations.
Read the latest research on ocean sustainability from AMI’s journals here.
Ocean Sustainabilty Scientific Advisory Group Members
Andre Antunes
Dr André Antunes is an environmental microbiologist, having devoted most of his research life to the study of microbial communities in marine and extreme environments. He is particularly interested in microbial biodiversity, changes in microbial community structure across environmental gradients, adaptations to extreme conditions and in cross-disciplinary research in the fields of geomicrobiology and astrobiology.
Ahmed Shibl
Dr. Ahmed Shibl is a multidisciplinary scientist with a background spanning microbiology, biotechnology, and bioinformatics. He currently serves as a member of the ISME Early Career Scientists Committee, a Champion within the National Microbiome Data Collaborative, and a former ASM Young Ambassador. With a broad interest in leveraging multiomics approaches, his research aims to better understand the functional adaptation of microbiomes in diverse ecosystems, ranging from the ocean to the human body. His current work focuses on elucidating the potential influence of microbial communities on host interactions and climate change events. Ahmed’s overarching goal is to address knowledge gaps concerning the intricate links between microbes, genomes, metabolites, and health/disease markers, ultimately contributing to solutions for contemporary societal and environmental challenges.
Alexandre S. Rosado
Professor Alexandre Rosado is a microbial Ecologist studying different aspects of microbial and microbiome sciences. Rosado's research is inter- and multidisciplinary at the interface of basic and applied environmental processes (microbes/microbiome-based solutions).
He is a Professor of Bioscience at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia. Former Full Professor at Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) and Visiting Professor at the Department of Land, Air and Water Resources, University of California - Davis, USA. Director of the Institute of Microbiology (2010-2014) and Vice-President of the Brazilian Society of Microbiology (2011-2014); holds a BSc in Biological Sciences, MSc (Microbiology), PhD in Microbiology from UFRJ and Wageningen University & Research (WUR), The Netherlands.
His main research interests are centred around the study of microbial diversity and new microbial metabolisms, using conventional tools associated with multi-omics approaches to understanding the evolutionary history, ecological roles, and physiological capacity and capabilities of free-living and symbiotic microorganisms, including those found at the extremes of where life exists. He is also interested in astrobiology, exploring concepts and fundamentals on how extremophiles can benefit crops, other biotechnological developments on Earth, and space research.
Janina Rahlff
The research of Dr. Janina Rahlff focusses on viral-bacterial interactions at air-water interfaces and their associated surface features. Her research deals with marine ecosystems but also extreme environments such as polar (Arctic) regions or the atmosphere. Dr. Rahlff is interested in microbial metabolic processes relevant for gas exchange and biogeochemistry, adaptations of viruses and microbes to their respective habitats and how microbial communities and virus-host interactions function across ecosystem boundaries.
Research interests: ocean, atmosphere, air, marine, microbial ecology, bacteria, bacteriophages, viruses, viromics, metagenomics.
Connie Lovejoy
My longstanding research interest began at UC Davis where I discovered that single celled algae were diverse, important and very attractive. Since algae are everywhere the voyage has taken me to both Polar Regions and I have explored everything from the tiniest ponds in Northern Québec to the Ocean basins. The realization that algae are protists and most eat bacteria led to my overarching interest in how microbial food webs are constructed and the interactions between protists, Bacteria and Archaea and how such interactions influence global carbon and nutrient cycling.
Technology has largely driven this field and the application of molecular tools to microbial ecology means that it is now possible to examine when and where species of the three domains of life co-occur and even to elucidate the diversity of key genes involved in for example carbon and nitrogen cycles. The impact of global climate change on physical biological interactions provides the lattice of my most recent research directions and is strongly influenced by the philosophy of integrative and systems biology.
Michael Cunliffe
I received a degree in environmental biology from the University of Liverpool, and a MSc and PhD in Microbiology from the University of Manchester. After a postdoc at the University of Warwick, I joined the Marine Biological Association (MBA) in 2010 as a MBA Research Fellow (Group Leader). In 2014, I started a joint appointment between the University of Plymouth and MBA, where I am currently Associate Professor of Marine Microbiology in the School of Biological and Marine Sciences and a MBA Senior Research Fellow. I create knowledge through research and communicate knowledge through teaching, outreach and knowledge exchange activities. I study a range of topics in microbial biology, ecology, and evolution. I work both in the lab and out in the marine environment, locally around Plymouth and with samples collected from distant locations, including polar regions and the open ocean.
Terence McGenity
Terry McGenity is a Professor at the University of Essex, UK. His PhD, investigating the microbial ecology of ancient salt deposits (University of Leicester), was followed by postdoctoral positions at the Japan Marine Science and Technology Centre (JAMSTEC, Yokosuka) and the Postgraduate Research Institute for Sedimentology (University of Reading). His overarching research interest is to understand how microbial communities function and interact to influence major biogeochemical processes. He has broad interests in microbial ecology and diversity, particularly with respect to carbon cycling (especially the second most abundantly produced hydrocarbon in the atmosphere, isoprene), and is driven to better understand how microbes cope with, or flourish, in hypersaline and poly-extreme environments.
Elizabeth Archer
Michael S Rappe
Mike is a tenured Research Professor at the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology, and is a member of the graduate faculty with the Departments of Oceanography, Microbiology, and the interdisciplinary Marine Biology Graduate Program at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. The overarching theme of his research is to understand the impact of microbial genetic diversity on ocean ecology, and interpret this diversity through the lens of bacterial taxonomy and evolution. He investigates the ecology and evolution of marine microorganisms by combining surveys of natural microbial communities, nucleic acid sequence data, and studies with model systems in controlled laboratory settings.
Emil Ruff
Emil Ruff is a microbial ecologist at the Ecosystems Center and Bay Paul Center. His research focuses on microbial interactions and population dynamics as drivers of community function. To disentangle microbial food webs, Emil mainly studies ecosystems with reduced complexity, such as natural or laboratory enrichment cultures, microbial blooms or extreme habitats. His work has improved our understanding of the sources and sinks of the greenhouse gas methane in seafloor ecosystems and groundwater aquifers. Currently, he is investigating the effect of bioirrigation on the removal of methane from wetland sediments. He has just received a 2021 Simons Foundation Early Career Investigator in Marine Microbial Ecology and Evolution Award to study mutualistic interactions between anoxygenic phototrophs and sulfur-reducing bacteria. His lab is also involved in projects studying i) the effect of pollutants on the microbiome of sea anemones, ii) the interactions between sulfur-cycling bacteria and cord grass roots in salt marshes, iii) plastics degradation in the deep sea, and iv) microbial degradation of macromolecules in hydrothermal sediments.
Chuanlun Zhang
Professor Dr. Chuanlun Zhang is Chair Professor, Department of Ocean Science and Engineering, Southern University of Science and Technology. He received his Ph.D. from Texas A&M University in 1994, worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory from 1994 to 1998, taught as an assistant professor in the Department of Geology at University of Missouri from 1998 to 2002 and as an associate and full professor (tenured) at the University of Georgia from 2002 to 2014. He also served as a chair professor at the State Key Laboratory of Marine Geology in Tongji University in China from 2008 to 2012. He was invited to join the Southern University of Science and Technology of China in 2017 to lead a program in Microbial Oceanography and Geomicrobiology and serves as the vice chair of the Department of Ocean Science and Engineering.
Professor Zhang has been dedicating his career to biogeochemical and geomicrobiological research as well as student training for over 20 years. His research interests include the role that microorganisms play in the environment and energy transfer, life evolution and global climate change, and technology driven paradigm shift in ocean ecological research. His research strength lies in integration of lipid biomarkers, stable isotopes and molecular DNA to study microbial (particularly archaeal) activities in carbon and nitrogen cycles. Major research topics include, but are not limited to, geomicrobiology in ocean trenches, deep subsurface, hot springs and other extreme environments; biogeochemistry associated with marine gas hydrates; genomics of marine and terrestrial archaea; development and application of climate and environmental proxies; and applying drone array technologies for monitoring ocean environment change and collecting water samples for simultaneous examination of ecological changes across time and space.
Prof. Zhang has published over 300 peer-reviewed papers in international journals of earth and life sciences. Dr. Zhang is the Chief Editor for the Biology of Archaea specialty in Frontiers in Microbiology (FM) and on editorial boards for Archaea and SCIENCE CHINA Earth Sciences. In June of 2016, he was elected as the Vice Chair (2018) and Chair (2020) of the Gordon Research Conference on Ocean Biogeochemistry.
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