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Linda Amaral Zettler (seated) and Rebecca Gast
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Fighting the Tide
New Center for Oceans and Human Health tackles small but powerful human health threats
Cape Cod, with its popular beaches and famous seafood, isn’t just a great tourist destination. Its coastal location—and that it’s in the backyard of some of the world’s best scientists—makes it an ideal laboratory for studying tiny waterborne organisms that can cause big problems for beach dwellers, seafood lovers, and others.
Harmful algal blooms, for example, cause an estimated 60,000 cases of algal poisoning in the U.S. each year. The blooms, commonly called “red tides,” create a variety of dangerous toxins, which people can inhale in aerosols or ingest when eating contaminated seafood.
Microbial human pathogens found in the marine environment also threaten people’s health. Waterborne protistan parasites, such as Giardia and Cryptosporidium, can be caught by drinking contaminated water or eating uncooked food that carries them. Certain bacteria enter U.S. coastal waters with the estimated 9.1 billion gallons of domestic sewage and industrial wastewater that spill daily into the coastal ocean. Such organisms are the dominant causes of marine-related illnesses in temperate regions. One especially nasty bacterium, Vibrio vulnificus, occurs naturally and is responsible for 95 percent of seafood-related deaths. It has also been tied to the rise in lethal wound infections acquired during recreational use of coastal waters.
To learn more about these small-but-powerful human adversaries, scientists from the MBL’s Josephine Bay Paul Center for Comparative Molecular Biology and Evolution have teamed with colleagues from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The collaboration is part of the new Woods Hole Center for Oceans and Human Health (COHH), which was established this summer to increase the world’s understanding of how oceanic processes affect the distribution and persistence of harmful algae and human pathogens, particularly in the temperate coastal ocean.
The work is important, says Linda Amaral Zettler, an MBL staff scientist who is working on one of four COHH-funded research projects. “We as a coastal community rely heavily on the ocean as a source of food, recreation, and, in many cases, livelihood. Harmful algal blooms and human pathogens in the marine environment threaten these resources and our way of life here on Cape Cod and beyond.”
“Woods Hole is especially suited to an Oceans and Human Health Center,” adds Amaral Zettler. “It is one of the few places that has a community of scientists with the type of broad backgrounds and expertise required to meet the challenging nature of the type of research questions we’re exploring . . . questions that lie at the intersection of physical, environmental, and biomedical sciences.”
For the MBL’s part, Josephine Bay Paul Center director and senior scientist Mitchell Sogin and staff scientist Hilary Morrison are directing the COHH Genomics Facility Core, which enables researchers to do high-volume DNA sequencing and analysis of the creatures in question. Amaral Zettler is working with WHOI colleague Rebecca Gast to investigate the distribution and abundance of human pathogens, including Giardia, Cryptosporidium, and Vibrio, in nearby Mount Hope Bay, Massachusetts. And Steve Hajduk, director of the Program in Global Infectious Diseases, is heading up the COHH’s Pilot Program, which is aimed at soliciting and reviewing applications for new COHH projects.
The Woods Hole COHH is headquartered at WHOI, directed by WHOI senior scientist John Stegeman, and is one of four joint Centers for Oceans and Human Health recently established around the country. The centers, which will support the work of numerous scientists, students, and scholars, are the first in a new collaboration between the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), one of the National Institutes of Health, and the National Science Foundation (NSF). The agencies are providing approximately $6.25 million over the next five years to establish the Woods Hole COHH and to fund four related research projects. The other centers, which have separate funding, are located at the University of Miami, the University of Hawaii, and the University of Washington.
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