Jeffrey Marlow

Scientists happened upon black goo on a ship — and discovered it was teeming with life | CNN A Great Lakes research vessel had goo leaking from its rudder shaft. Scientists later found it contained previously undiscovered microorganisms.

Oh check it out, @microbesheik.bsky.social found some cool microbes in "mysterious goo" from a ship's rudder shaft...and I got to talk about it 😂

www.cnn.com/2025/08/01/s...

Flourishing chemosynthetic life at the greatest depths of hadal trenches - Nature The discovery of chemosynthesis-based benthic communities at depths of 5,800 m to 9,533 m in the Kuril–Kamchatka and western Aleutian trenches challenges traditional perspectives on the energy sources...

Check out "the deepest and the most extensive chemosynthesis-based communities known to exist on Earth" - methane seeps along Russia's NE coast, down to a depth of 9500 meters! 😮

It's amazing that such incredible ecosystems remain to be found in the deep sea...

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Eeeek, this would be bad!

YouTube video by Scientific American Nodules: Deep-Sea Life Giver or Key to Our Energy Future?

Check out this beautiful doc from @fieseler.bsky.social on nodules & "dark oxygen" - honored to be part of it!

Our (and others') research on dark oxygen remains bewildering, exciting...and critically important as we try to understand how the deep sea really works.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jcm...

I mean, we mostly do it to avoid contaminating the samples rather than to protect ourselves, but added benefit I suppose! 😂

Spatiotemporal faunal connectivity across global sea floors - Nature We analyse a global dataset of genomic DNA sequences for Ophiuroidea to gain an understanding of phylogenetic divergence and biotic movement across oceans, finding phylogentically divergent faunas at ...

For marine invertebrates, the deep sea - unlike shallower coastal waters - is all connected...

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The year’s crowning achievement! 🙌😂

Methane-powered sea spiders: Diverse, epibiotic methanotrophs serve as a source of nutrition for deep-sea methane seep Sericosura | PNAS Methane seeps harbor uncharacterized animal–microbe symbioses with unique nutritional strategies. Three undescribed sea spider species (family Ammo...

Oooh so cool! Sea spiders that farm methane-eating microbes on their exoskeletons 😮

Methane seeps never cease to amaze...

www.pnas.org/doi/full/10....

Why we should protect the high seas from all extraction, forever Exploitation of the high seas risks doing irreversible damage to biodiversity, climate stability and ocean equity. A consensus must be built now to save them.

"Why we should protect the high seas from all extraction, forever"

This is an uphill battle (to say the least), but a compelling case! Mostly the argument is, we just don't need stuff from the high seas, so why go to the trouble? 🤷

www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Engineered orthogonal and obligate bacterial commensalism mediated by a non-standard amino acid - Nature Microbiology A genetically engineered microbial symbiosis based on synthetic auxotrophy is created, with potential implications as a biocontainment strategy.

Could this be a way to keep synthetic microbes released into the environment in check? Forcing a dependence on a non-standard amino acid produced by a partner microbe...
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Made a science pilgrimage to St. Anthony Falls Lab the other day! It’s right next to a dammed part of the Mississippi River, and uses the water flow to run large-scale hydrology and geomorphology experiments. Part of the river can essentially be diverted to run *through* the building!

Lovely visit to @uconn.bsky.social last week! Learned a lot about low-cost nitrate and ozone sensors 😮👏

Recently upgraded Alvin can now dive to 6500m. Read our new article about its capabilities, latest #deepsea science discoveries, & new milestones on its #science verification expedition 🌊🛠🧪.

Thx to the entire whoi.edu Alvin team & funding from
#NSF-funded #USONR @noaa.gov @urigso.bsky.social

2025 DeSSC New User Program Application The 2025 DeSSC New User Program is scheduled for 11, 12 Feb 2025 at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

Reminder to grad students / postdocs hoping to get more involved in deep-sea research - the Deep Submergence Science Committee's New User Program is accepting applications!

www.unols.org/event/early-...

docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

We think this technique has a lot of potential for microbiologists hoping to tease apart the differentially active subpopulations in complex communities.

Please share any comments / critiques / thoughts on the @biorxivpreprint.bsky.social page. Thanks for reading!

Finally, we sequenced the microbes in each of these three populations, using fluorescence activated cell sorting. Seems like carbon transfer between plants and microbes ⬆️ during the day, and sulfur cycling ⬆️ at night.

It worked here too! Some cells grew during the day, some grew during the night, and some grew the whole time.

Then we tested it in the real world, using salt marsh sediment from Cape Cod. The rich microbial community got one amino acid during the sunlit daytime, and the other during the dark nighttime.

Turns out, it works! We validated the approach with E. coli, which could incorporate both amino acids (shown with red and green dyes, alongside the blue showing all cells...)

But why use just one of these two artificial amino acids? Why not use both? That way, we can see who's growing under different conditions in the same experiment.

...We can then add fluorescent tags to the artificial amino acids with click chemistry and see the cells that were growing 🤯

This is a critical tool for distinguishing "signal" from "noise" in any microbiome, since most microbes aren't actually growing at any given time.

BONCAT - or Bio-Orthogonal Non-Canonical Amino Acid Tagging - is a great way to determine which organisms in a complex community are actually growing. Microbes mistake one of two artificial amino acids for methionine, and build it into new proteins...

Dual-BONCAT Reveals Distinct Day- and Night-Active Microbial Populations in Salt Marsh Sediments Bio-Orthogonal Non-Canonical Amino Acid Tagging (BONCAT) has emerged as a prominent molecular technique that enables microbial ecologists to visualize and identify metabolically active taxa within com...

New paper alert! 🚨 (Well, a preprint for now :)

Introducing "Dual-BONCAT" - a new approach to distinguish two different metabolically active subpopulations within a single microbiome experiment.

biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

A little more info in the thread below 👇

YouTube video by Schmidt Ocean Southern Canyon System 02 | SOI Divestream 760

Hello bluesky 👋 For all you oceany people out there --> dive alert in the SE Pacific, just off the coast of Chile! We're exploring some previously unvisited submarine canyons to study their geological foundations and catalog their biodiversity.

Follow along here!
www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZ1i...