Ocean on a Table-top
ABSTRACT
Why study microscopic life in the ocean: All life first evolved in the ocean. The salt composition of our own blood still reflects the salt composition of the ocean - reminding us of where we all come from. Biological processes in the ocean generate half of the oxygen we all breathe and remove ~30% of all the carbon we emit into the atmosphere every year. Moreover, the ocean harbors early divergent life forms we know almost nothing about, holding the key to biological mechanisms yet unknown to us. With so much potential, it is ironic that this unique ecosystem and its inhabitants are also the least understood.
Challenge: Since our deep fundamental understanding of life on earth has been so narrowly based only on a few terrestrial model systems, we are missing completely new cellular mechanisms employed by marine species, with the potential to transform our understanding of life on earth - including new biomedical solutions. While we continue to amass large amounts of genomic data (for example the Tara Global Ocean Atlas of Eukaryotic Genes produced 116 million unigenes, majority (51.2%) of unigenes currently have no matches in public sequence databases), the complex behavior of these microscopic single cell eukaryotes is beyond the reach of genomic survey alone.
Since the ecology of the ocean ranges from 100 meters to multiple kilometers - while single cells can be as small as 100 or 10 microns in length. The paradox here is how do we observe life at cellular resolution (say single cell) while it is freely migrating hundreds of meters up and down in a changing oceanic environment - without making a microscope that is hundreds of meters tall.
Here we resolve this paradox and present a unique solution to this problem - an (anti)-gravity machine - a scale-free, autonomous vertical tracking microscope based on a close-loop circular “hydrodynamic treadmill” that presents a vertically stratified virtual reality environment for single cells while tracking and imaging vertical migration over infinite distances at sub-cellular resolution. This framework allows us to directly measure planktonic behavior in past, present and future oceans - with a press of a button - and directly measure how organismic behavior changes plastically with changing oceans, and what implications this has for the carbon cycle in the ocean.
In order to address the challenges of studying microscopic life forms in it’s oceanic context - we have developed a completely new framework for studying microscopic life in the ocean - by enabling a technological platform for eco-physiological experiments conducted both at sea and in research labs. We call this framework - “Ocean on a table top” - a virtual reality arena for single cells, single plankton and small marine organisms - that can be imaged, observed over a long time, and studied completely unhindered in a lab or on-board a research vessel – as if the organisms were directly in the ocean.
Here we intend to develop “ocean on a table top” - an experimental, computational and theoretical tools that will allow us to observe, study and perturb single cell and single plankton behavior in a research vessel or lab setting - simulating a virtual reality arena for cells (aka a metaverse for living single cells).
