E. Virginia Armbrust

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E. Virginia Armbrust is a biological oceanographer, professor, and current director of the University of Washington School of Oceanography. [1] She is an elected member of the Washington State Academy of Science, [2] an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, [3] and an elected fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology. [4]

Contents

Education

Armbrust obtained a bachelor's degree in human biology at Stanford University in 1980. She then proceeded to obtain a PhD in biological oceanography from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in 1990. [5]

Research career

Following her doctorate, Armbrust began working as a postdoctoral researcher. She then became faculty at the University of Washington in 1996 and was elected director of the School of Oceanography in 2011. [5]

Armbrust's current research focuses on phytoplankton and their interactions with bacteria. She is an investigator of the Simons Foundation in microbial oceanography. [6]

She led a project which assembled the genome for a type of marine Euryarchaeota that could not be cultured in the lab. This involved sequencing the genomes of a mixtures of microorganisms from seawater, and assembling related sequence fragments into a complete genome for the marine Euryarchaeota specifically. [7] [8]

Selected publications

Awards

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Endosymbiont</span> Organism that lives within the body or cells of another organism

An endosymbiont or endobiont is an organism that lives within the body or cells of another organism. Typically the two organisms are in a mutualistic relationship. Examples are nitrogen-fixing bacteria, which live in the root nodules of legumes, single-cell algae inside reef-building corals, and bacterial endosymbionts that provide essential nutrients to insects.

The photic zone is the uppermost layer of a body of water that receives sunlight, allowing phytoplankton to perform photosynthesis. It undergoes a series of physical, chemical, and biological processes that supply nutrients into the upper water column. The photic zone is home to the majority of aquatic life due to the activity of the phytoplankton. The thicknesses of the photic and euphotic zones vary with the intensity of sunlight as a function of season and latitude and with the degree of water turbidity. The bottommost, or aphotic, zone is the region of perpetual darkness that lies beneath the photic zone and includes most of the ocean waters.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Diatom</span> Single-celled alga with a silica cell wall

A diatom is any member of a large group comprising several genera of algae, specifically microalgae, found in the oceans, waterways and soils of the world. Living diatoms make up a significant portion of the Earth's biomass: they generate about 20 to 50 percent of the oxygen produced on the planet each year, take in over 6.7 billion tonnes of silicon each year from the waters in which they live, and constitute nearly half of the organic material found in the oceans. The shells of dead diatoms can reach as much as a half-mile deep on the ocean floor, and the entire Amazon basin is fertilized annually by 27 million tons of diatom shell dust transported by transatlantic winds from the African Sahara, much of it from the Bodélé Depression, which was once made up of a system of fresh-water lakes.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Phytoplankton</span> Autotrophic members of the plankton ecosystem

Phytoplankton are the autotrophic (self-feeding) components of the plankton community and a key part of ocean and freshwater ecosystems. The name comes from the Greek words φυτόν, meaning 'plant', and πλαγκτός, meaning 'wanderer' or 'drifter'.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Biological pump</span> Carbon capture process in oceans

The biological pump (or ocean carbon biological pump or marine biological carbon pump) is the ocean's biologically driven sequestration of carbon from the atmosphere and land runoff to the ocean interior and seafloor sediments. In other words, it is a biologically mediated process which results in the sequestering of carbon in the deep ocean away from the atmosphere and the land. The biological pump is the biological component of the "marine carbon pump" which contains both a physical and biological component. It is the part of the broader oceanic carbon cycle responsible for the cycling of organic matter formed mainly by phytoplankton during photosynthesis (soft-tissue pump), as well as the cycling of calcium carbonate (CaCO3) formed into shells by certain organisms such as plankton and mollusks (carbonate pump).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Euryarchaeota</span> Kingdom of archaea

Euryarchaeota is a kingdom of archaea. Euryarchaeota are highly diverse and include methanogens, which produce methane and are often found in intestines; halobacteria, which survive extreme concentrations of salt; and some extremely thermophilic aerobes and anaerobes, which generally live at temperatures between 41 and 122 °C. They are separated from the other archaeans based mainly on rRNA sequences and their unique DNA polymerase. The only validly published name for this group under the Prokaryotic Code is Methanobacteriati.

High-nutrient, low-chlorophyll (HNLC) regions are regions of the ocean where the abundance of phytoplankton is low and fairly constant despite the availability of macronutrients. Phytoplankton rely on a suite of nutrients for cellular function. Macronutrients are generally available in higher quantities in surface ocean waters, and are the typical components of common garden fertilizers. Micronutrients are generally available in lower quantities and include trace metals. Macronutrients are typically available in millimolar concentrations, while micronutrients are generally available in micro- to nanomolar concentrations. In general, nitrogen tends to be a limiting ocean nutrient, but in HNLC regions it is never significantly depleted. Instead, these regions tend to be limited by low concentrations of metabolizable iron. Iron is a critical phytoplankton micronutrient necessary for enzyme catalysis and electron transport.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Photosynthetic picoplankton</span> Group of photosynthetic plankton

Photosynthetic picoplankton or picophytoplankton is the fraction of the photosynthetic phytoplankton of cell sizes between 0.2 and 2 μm. It is especially important in the central oligotrophic regions of the world oceans that have very low concentration of nutrients.

<i>Thalassiosira pseudonana</i> Species of single-celled organism

Thalassiosira pseudonana is a species of marine centric diatoms. It was chosen as the first eukaryotic marine phytoplankton for whole genome sequencing. T. pseudonana was selected for this study because it is a model for diatom physiology studies, belongs to a genus widely distributed throughout the world's oceans, and has a relatively small genome at 34 mega base pairs. Scientists are researching on diatom light absorption, using the marine diatom of Thalassiosira. The diatom requires a high enough concentration of CO2 in order to utilize C4 metabolism (Clement et al. 2015).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bacterioplankton</span> Bacterial component of the plankton that drifts in the water column

Bacterioplankton refers to the bacterial component of the plankton that drifts in the water column. The name comes from the Ancient Greek word πλαγκτός (planktós), meaning "wandering" or "drifting", and bacterium, a Latin term coined in the 19th century by Christian Gottfried Ehrenberg. They are found in both seawater and fresh water.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Marine microorganisms</span> Any life form too small for the naked human eye to see that lives in a marine environment

Marine microorganisms are defined by their habitat as microorganisms living in a marine environment, that is, in the saltwater of a sea or ocean or the brackish water of a coastal estuary. A microorganism is any microscopic living organism or virus, which is invisibly small to the unaided human eye without magnification. Microorganisms are very diverse. They can be single-celled or multicellular and include bacteria, archaea, viruses, and most protozoa, as well as some fungi, algae, and animals, such as rotifers and copepods. Many macroscopic animals and plants have microscopic juvenile stages. Some microbiologists also classify viruses as microorganisms, but others consider these as non-living.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Particulate organic matter</span>

Particulate organic matter (POM) is a fraction of total organic matter operationally defined as that which does not pass through a filter pore size that typically ranges in size from 0.053 millimeters (53 μm) to 2 millimeters.

<i>Thalassiosira</i> Genus of single-celled organisms

Thalassiosira is a genus of centric diatoms, comprising over 100 marine and freshwater species. It is a diverse group of photosynthetic eukaryotes that make up a vital part of marine and freshwater ecosystems, in which they are key primary producers and essential for carbon cycling

Bess Ward is an American oceanographer, biogeochemist, microbiologist, and William J. Sinclair Professor of Geosciences at Princeton University.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Marine protists</span> Protists that live in saltwater or brackish water

Marine protists are defined by their habitat as protists that live in marine environments, that is, in the saltwater of seas or oceans or the brackish water of coastal estuaries. Life originated as marine single-celled prokaryotes and later evolved into more complex eukaryotes. Eukaryotes are the more developed life forms known as plants, animals, fungi and protists. Protists are the eukaryotes that cannot be classified as plants, fungi or animals. They are mostly single-celled and microscopic. The term protist came into use historically as a term of convenience for eukaryotes that cannot be strictly classified as plants, animals or fungi. They are not a part of modern cladistics because they are paraphyletic.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Particulate inorganic carbon</span>

Particulate inorganic carbon (PIC) can be contrasted with dissolved inorganic carbon (DIC), the other form of inorganic carbon found in the ocean. These distinctions are important in chemical oceanography. Particulate inorganic carbon is sometimes called suspended inorganic carbon. In operational terms, it is defined as the inorganic carbon in particulate form that is too large to pass through the filter used to separate dissolved inorganic carbon.

Mary Jane Perry is an American oceanographer known for the use of optics to study marine phytoplankton.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Great Calcite Belt</span> High-calcite region of the Southern Ocean

The Great Calcite Belt (GCB) refers to a region of the ocean where there are high concentrations of calcite, a mineral form of calcium carbonate. The belt extends over a large area of the Southern Ocean surrounding Antarctica. The calcite in the Great Calcite Belt is formed by tiny marine organisms called coccolithophores, which build their shells out of calcium carbonate. When these organisms die, their shells sink to the bottom of the ocean, and over time, they accumulate to form a thick layer of calcite sediment.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tatiana Rynearson</span> American oceanographer

Tatiana Rynearson is an American oceanographer who is a professor at the University of Rhode Island. Her research considers plankton diversity and abundance. Rynearson has been on several research cruises, including trips to the North Sea, Puget Sound, the Gulf of Mexico and the North Atlantic.

Gabrielle Rocap is an American marine biologist and academic noted for her research on the evolution and ecology of marine bacteria and phytoplankton. She is one of the researchers who discovered microorganisms in the Pacific Ocean that consume arsenic to survive. She is currently a professor in the Oceanography department of the University of Washington.

References

  1. "The School of Oceanography, University of Washington". www.ocean.washington.edu. Retrieved 2017-03-08.
  2. "Armbrust select for State Academy of Sciences" . Retrieved 2017-03-08.
  3. "AAAS Fellow" . Retrieved 2017-03-08.
  4. "E. Virginia Armbrust". Archived from the original on 2017-03-09. Retrieved 2017-03-08.
  5. 1 2 Webmaster (2011-03-11). "Virginia Armbrust Named Director of UW School of Oceanography | Ocean Leadership". Consortium for Ocean Leadership. Retrieved 2019-05-10.
  6. "Microbial Oceanography". Simons Foundation. Retrieved 2019-05-10.
  7. Bhanoo, Sindya N. (2012-02-06). "Plucking a Strand of Genetic Insight From the Sea". The New York Times. ISSN   0362-4331 . Retrieved 2020-03-22.
  8. Iverson, Vaughn; Morris, Robert M.; Frazar, Christian D.; Berthiaume, Chris T.; Morales, Rhonda L.; Armbrust, E. Virginia (2012-02-03). "Untangling Genomes from Metagenomes: Revealing an Uncultured Class of Marine Euryarchaeota". Science. 335 (6068): 587–590. Bibcode:2012Sci...335..587I. doi:10.1126/science.1212665. ISSN   0036-8075. PMID   22301318. S2CID   31381073.
  9. Amin, S. A.; Hmelo, L. R.; van Tol, H. M.; Durham, B. P.; Carlson, L. T.; Heal, K. R.; Morales, R. L.; Berthiaume, C. T.; Parker, M. S. (2015-06-04). "Interaction and signalling between a cosmopolitan phytoplankton and associated bacteria". Nature. 522 (7554): 98–101. Bibcode:2015Natur.522...98A. doi:10.1038/nature14488. ISSN   0028-0836. PMID   26017307. S2CID   4462055.
  10. Hennon, Gwenn M. M.; Ashworth, Justin; Groussman, Ryan D.; Berthiaume, Chris; Morales, Rhonda L.; Baliga, Nitin S.; Orellana, Mónica V.; Armbrust, E. V. (2015-08-01). "Diatom acclimation to elevated CO2 via cAMP signalling and coordinated gene expression". Nature Climate Change. 5 (8): 761–765. Bibcode:2015NatCC...5..761H. doi:10.1038/nclimate2683. ISSN   1758-678X.
  11. "Rachel Carson Lecture | AGU". www.agu.org. Retrieved 2021-05-08.