Peipei Wu, Emily J Zakem, Stephanie Dutkiewicz, Yanxu Zhang (2020), Biomagnification of methylmercury in a marine plankton ecosystem, Environ. Sci. Technol., doi: 10.1021/acs.est.9b06075 Continue reading
Category Archives: Uncategorized
Darwin Goes to Ocean Sciences 2020
Look out for the Darwin team, sharing their work at this year’s Ocean Sciences conference taking place February 16-21 in San Diego, California.
Jozef I. Nissimov, David Talmy, Liti Haramaty, Helen Fredricks, Ehud Zelzion, Benjamin Knowles, Murat Eren, Rebecca Vandzura, Christien P. Laber, Brittany M. Schieler, Christopher T. Johns, Kuldeep More, Marco J.L. Coolen, Michael J. Follows, Debashish Bhattacharya, Benjamin A.S. Van Mooy, Kay D. Bidle (2019), Biochemical diversity of glycosphingolipid biosynthesis as a driver of Coccolithovirus competitive ecology, Enviromental Microbiology, doi: 10.1111/1462-2920.14633 Continue reading
Tropical Pacific is the major player in global ocean heat transport
A new Nature Geoscience paper co-authored by MIT Darwin Project member, research scientist, Gael Forget finds that global ocean heat transport is dominated by heat export from the tropical Pacific.
Darwin Goes to Nautical Day at the MIT Museum
MIT Darwin Group Research Scientist Jonathan Lauderdale and Postdoc Maike Sonnewald, use a simple game involving Swedish Fish, inspired by principles put forth by ecologist Crawford Stanley (Buzz) Holling, to model connections between food abundance and predator consumption at MIT Museum’s 2019 Nautical Day, February 23rd. Continue reading
Digital Ocean
Modeling the diverse world of phytoplankton opens up a predictive view of our own. MIT’s Spectrum Magazine spotlight’s the Darwin Project. Continue reading
Ben A. Ward and Michael J. Follows (2016), Marine Mizotrophy Increases Trophic Transfer Efficiency, Mean Organism Size, and Vertical Carbon Flux, PNAS – early online edition.
Talmy, D., J. Blackford, N. J. Hardman-Mountford, L. Polimene, M.J. Follows, and R.J. Geider (2014) Flexible C : N ratio enhances metabolism of large phytoplankton when resource supply is intermittent. Biogeosciences, 11, 4881-4895, doi: 10.5194/bg-11-4881-2014
For the Good of the Colony
For some microbes, the motto for growth is not so much “every cell for itself,” but rather, “all for one and one for all.”
MIT researchers have found that cells in a bacterial colony grow in a way that benefits the community as a whole. That is, while an individual cell may divide in the presence of plentiful resources to benefit itself, when a cell is a member of a larger colony, it may choose instead to grow in a more cooperative fashion, increasing an entire colony’s chance of survival.
Publication
Kempes, CP et al. (2013) Morphological optimization for access to dual oxidants in biofilms PNAS, 111, 1, 208-213, doi:10.1073/pnas.1315521110)