Ocean microbiology

I lead the ocean microbiology team in C3 at UTS. Our research is focussed on studying the ocean's smallest inhabitants, the microorganisms. These microbes, which include bacteria, microalgae and viruses, play several important roles in the ocean. They form the base of the marine food web, which means that they're significant for things like fisheries yields, and they perform the bulk of chemical cycling processes in the ocean, and this can ultimately influence our climate.
 

While these microbes influence the ocean on global scales, the interactions take place in much, much smaller scales, which occupy only a fraction of an individual drop of sea water. To overcome this obstacle we've started applying new microscale techniques, such as microfluidics. Microfluidics involves the fabrication of very small chips on to which we can etch complex patterns and control microscale volumes of fluids.
 

With our collaborators at MIT we've designed a suite of these microfluidic chips, which allow us to manipulate the chemical environment experienced by these microbes and look at their behavioural responses in a patchy chemical seascape. Using these approaches are allowing us to begin to understand the ecology of microbes at the scales that are most relevant to them, and provide new insights into the way that the ocean functions. 
 

What I value at UTS is that there's a large group of oceanographers and microbial ecologists studying areas that we're interested in. The impact of integrating new technologies such as microfluidics into this oceanographic research is allowing us, for the first time, to understand the roles of microbes at their scales of interaction in the ocean. This is providing us with a much better understanding of the way that the base of the marine food web operates.