Many processes of past life are recorded as signals in sediments at the bottom of lakes and the ocean. Paleo-oceanographers take those
signals and reconstruct conditions of the past. However, parts of those signals are erased - just like scratches on a dirty CD will
erase part of the song. Rick's lab is attempting to reconstruct the largest assemblage of information as they can, information that
is then handed off to paleo-oceanographers so that they can read the record. "Our approach places us squarely at the center of two
rapidly growing areas of research - microbial ecology and carbon cycling," says Rick.
"In general you can think of our lab as the group of people who fix scratches on a CD." |
Rick's lab does do some "reading of the record" as well. They study a suite of compounds called lignins, which are found in
every plant, using this information to reconstruct how an entire region has changed over time. The analysis used to study lignins
is similar to the analysis used to examine other compounds found in seawater - such as
cooking spices. "Our ability to measure lignin translates really
well to our ability to measure
cooking spices, pollutants, chlorinated phenols," says Rick.
[
Listen to Rick
talk about environmental spices on NPR.]
Another area of exploration is in
reconstructive marine proteomics - extracting
protein signals then reconstructing the ecology of an environment. "We would like to find proteins in the sediment record so that we can
reconstruct the ecology or function of an organism that might not have left some other record," says Rick. "We want to use proteins
to interpret the past of organisms that don't leave behind a shell but only leave behind an organic marker."
In order to understand the signal in the mud, it's important to understand how the signal got there. "We put out large 'garbage cans' that
collect falling dead stuff, collect it and interrogate it," says Rick. "Our core research is trapping fecal material, interrogating it
for lignins (its terrestrial sources), and proteins (its marine sources), then using that information to reconstruct the sound of
life recoded in the sediments." All of which is complementary to the lab's local research and
SoundCitizen work.
Funded Research Projects
