Inspired by true events

Characterization of phytoplankton-excreted metabolites mediating carbon flux through the surface ocean | PNAS The marine labile dissolved organic carbon (DOC) pool is a dynamic reservoir of thousands of molecules that cycles approximately one-quarter of Ear...

So excited to share our newest paper on #marine #exometabolites. A great effort led by Yuting Zhu, Hanna Anderson, and others in the C-CoMP team www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

📣New today: A WHOI-led study uncovers a hidden mix of molecules released by marine phytoplankton, tiny compounds that feed ocean microbes and help power the planet’s carbon cycle.

📲Learn more about this @microbialplanet.bsky.social research: go.whoi.edu/phytoplankton-metabolites

Amazing to see how many people have been visiting NCAR/UCAR over the past week— I hadn’t visited since a field trip in primary school, but was prompted to pay a visit during my time at home. The parking lot was packed when I arrived. A lovely reminder of the power of community :)

What's NCAR? and 8 ways it has helped you

www.forbes.com/sites/marsha...

A little thing that brings me joy is conceptualizing the magnitude of genomic datasets in physical distances— if every nucleotide in my current contigs database were a 1mm bead on a string, that string would stretch from NYC to São Paulo, Brazil! 🤓

Wrapping up a great week of science with some light LEGO dehydration synthesis! @microbialplanet.bsky.social
@fuuchan20.bsky.social
@maksaito.bsky.social

Global “Climate Opportunity Benefit” of Forest Regeneration: Meta‐Analysis Shows Warming From Soil CH4 and N2O Is Small Relative to Agriculture Restored upland ecosystems absorb small amounts of methane but release more nitrous oxide, resulting in a net warming combined effect The radiative cooling from carbon storage in restored ecosyst...

We combed 12,003 published studies to evaluate how soil CH4 and N2O emissions affect net CO2 offsets across unmanaged biomes. The result? Warming from CH4-N2O effects diminishes but does not outweigh the climate opportunity benefits of ecosystem restoration. @columbiauniversity.bsky.social

The science personnel of C-CoMP Cruise AE2520 (and Clio) stand together on the stern of the R/V Atlantic Explorer. Parts of the Woods Hole dock and village frame the background of the photo. Photo provided by Elizabeth Kujawinski and edited by Laura Gray.

The science personnel of C-CoMP Cruise AE2520 (and Clio) stand together on the stern of the R/V Atlantic Explorer while making various fun poses. Parts of the Woods Hole dock and village frame the background of the photo. Photo provided by Elizabeth Kujawinski and edited by Laura Gray.

🌊🦠#FieldworkFriday!
And that’s a wrap 🎬on C-CoMP Cruise 2 🚢! We (C-CoMP + AE) accomplished an impressive feat - 95 CTD casts, 110,778 L of sw filtered with @clio-thebgcauv.bsky.social, eddy sampling, & 9 exp types across 3 locations - to characterize marine chemical currencies & microbes!

Claire Garfield and McKenzie Powers filter incubation seawater in the main lab on the R/V Atlantic Explorer during the C-CoMP March 2025 cruise. Lines of tubing pass through the peristaltic pump heads, drape off the lab bench, and terminate in large blue carboys that collect the filtered seawater. Photo by Erin Maybach.

The lab set-up for filtering samples for metatranscriptomics during the incubations on the C-CoMP March 2025 cruise. A series of peristaltic pumps are arranged on the lab bench with tubing passing through. Seawater is pumped up through the tubing from a carboy, passed through a filter holder containing a filter to remove microbial cells, and filtrate is collected in another carboy. Filtering is done in red light to minimize disturbance of photosynthetic cells in samples that were collected at night. Photo by Erin Maybach.

🌊🦠#FieldworkFriday!
It’s a carbon feast 🍽️ and microbes🦠are invited! During the March 2025 C-CoMP cruise, early career researchers incubated surface ocean microbial communities on novel carbon sources produced by phytoplankton to study carbon drawdown rate and post-uptake fate.

Atlas Data Storage to Develop Synthetic DNA Data Storage - Techstrong IT Atlas Data Storage, a spin-off of Twist Bioscience, is a pioneering startup focused on creating enterprise data storage apps based on synthetic DNA.

This is what sci-fi dreams are made of!!

So well deserved! Congratulations!! :)

The war on science in the US is already having an effect on private sector research like AlphaFold. Bears repeating but the private sector builds on top of things created by academic research for the public good. This hurts everyone.

NIH funding supporting the HMMER and Infernal software projects has been terminated. NIH states that our work, as well as all other federally funded research at Harvard, is of no benefit to the US.

I had the opportunity to share how I apply machine learning concepts in my genomics research at the @lamont.columbia.edu 75th anniversary symposium last week! Being an ECR can be so cool!

Warming stripes on the road to OCP @lamont.columbia.edu, with a question that is now more relevant than ever given the state of climate science in the US today.

What is next?

NASA Is Terminating The GISS Lease In Five Weeks This was just sent to all NASA Goddard and GISS employees by Makenzie Lystrup

NASA Is Terminating The GISS Lease In Five Weeks
nasawatch.com/personnel-ne...

"NASA’s lease of Columbia University’s Armstrong Hall in New York City, home to the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, will end effective May 31, 2025."

I imagine assembling a crummy metagenome is akin to being on Chopped…

In your basket you will find:
-Short reads from a soil sample sequenced at 0.5 Gb depth
-An incomplete reference database
-And an annotation tool that hasn’t been updated since 2010.
You have 2 CPU-core hours. Good luck.🔥

Wonderful thread from @erinmaybach.bsky.social on the experience of a (primarily) computational scientist going on their first oceanographic research cruise. Really transporting!

TLDR; science is cool :) 8/8

It’s pretty incredible — and I think having this experience will make me a better researcher, even if most of my work still happens behind a keyboard rather than behind a CTD. 7/8

But I share it because, as someone who loves the “invisible” molecular aspects of ocean science, I had never truly considered that these processes could be sensed on a human scale. 6/8

I still don’t have the words to articulate the subtle differences beyond a sense that these “invisible” features could best explain the vibe shift I felt between study sites. I won’t claim the title of "oceanographer" after my first field experience or this rather basic moment of realization. 5/8

Beyond the weather and sea surface temperature, I could feel subtle shifts that could only be attributed to the "invisible" features I'd previously thought of as abstract or purely theoretical. 4/8

Across both ends of the spectrum, these considered these processes as essentially invisible to the naked eye... Seeing the contrast between the Sargasso Sea and the Coastal New England Shelf, I was struck by how many differences, both obvious and nuanced, were tangible. 3/8

Through my graduate education so far, I’ve learned about the ocean at two extremes: the very, very large scale – concepts like Rossby numbers and geostrophic flow – and the very, very small scale – metabolites and dissolved organic matter composition. 2/8

As a primarily computational researcher, one of the most surprising takeaways from my first oceanographic research cruise was just how different ocean regimes feel from one another. I know this might sound obvious to many oceanographers, but for me, it was a major "aha!" moment. 🧵1/8

Scientists & students from C-CoMP are headed to sea today to study ocean microbial dynamics. The research expedition on the R/V Atlantic Explorer is traveling from Bermuda to Woods Hole, MA @microbialplanet.bsky.social ccomp-stc.org

C-CoMP researchers pose for a group picture on the bow of the R/V Atlantic Explorer as it approaches Woods Hole. Photo provided by Liz Kujawinski.

And that's a wrap! Over the past two weeks, C-CoMP researchers braved stormy weather & rough seas to collect precious samples that will offer insights into the chemical-microbial network of the surface ocean 🌊🦠🚢!
More photos and stories to come - stay tuned!

A close-up photo of Erin Maybach standing in front of steps and a building. Photo provided by Erin Maybach.

A photo of Erin Maybach rinsing out a bottle with seawater on the deck of a boat during C-CoMP BIOS Research Week in Bermuda. Photo provided by Erin Maybach.

A photo of Erin Maybach working in the lab. Photo provided by Erin Maybach.

📣#MTTM
Graduate student Erin Maybach, a member of the Dyhrman Microbial Oceanography Group at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University, investigates how microbial interactions regulate the flux of carbon through the surface ocean using computational and experimental approaches.