Hi, my name is Luke Thompson andI'm a marine microbiologist.This means I study bacteria andviruses in the ocean.Today, I'm going to tell youa little bit about the work I andother marine microbiologist do.We use many of the sametools of genomics andtranscriptomics, that you've heardabout in the last couple of lectures.Here you can see some photos froma research cruise I went on,in the Mediterranean and Red Sea.In the upper right,is me standing next to a device weuse to collect water from the ocean.It's called a CTD.On the left you can see two of mycolleagues bringing the CTD full of water,back onto the ship's deck.It's very heavy so they use a crane.On the lower right,are some other colleagues samplingsediment from the ocean floor.That metal device is called a box corer.There are all sorts of microorganisms,in sea water and sediment.We can study them by sequencing,their DNA and RNA.Here you can see a 3D map of the Red Sea.It's colored by temperature,with the warmest water in red andthe coolest water in blue.On a 2011 cruise, I sampled 50 stationsthroughout the Red Sea, taking water andmicrobes, from the surfacedown to 500 meters.Our CTD, measured physical parameterslike temperature, salinity and oxygen.When we got back on land,we measured certain chemicals,like nitrate, phosphate, and silicate.Which are nutrients forthe micro-organisms.The hardest and most expensive part,was isolating andsequencing DNA from all those samples.From the millions of DNA sequences,we were able to calculate, which genes andpathways, are present inthe microbes from the Red Sea.The diagram on the right, shows how wetake samples from different environments,filter out their microbes,extract the DNA, and sequence it.From all these data, we are nowlearning how marine microbes andtheir genes, are organized in relation totheir physical and chemical environment.These kinds of tools have been applied tomarine environments closer to home too.We all remember the deep waterhorizon oil spill in 2011,when 5 million barrels of oil werespilled into the Gulf of Mexico.We humans, put a lot of effortinto cleaning up the spill,but sodid the microbes living in the Gulf.Marine microbiologistswhen down to the Gulf,to see how microbes wereresponding to the oil spill.They found that a groupof uncultured bacteria,was blooming in response to the oil.They sequenced the DNA andRNA from these microbes.As you learned in the last few lectures,the study of DNA is called genomics.And the study of RNA is a transcriptomics.These tools, help us understand who is inan environment, and what they're doing.Using these tools, the researchersdetermined that the blooming microbes,were using genes that allowed themto move to the oil and degrade it.The diagram on the right,shows the different genetic functions ofthese bacteria, that wereactivated in response to the oil.It turns out,the microbes use the oil as food.Thanks to genomics and related methods,we now have a better understanding,of how the ocean responds to bothnatural and human-caused events.