NSF-NIEHS Research Center of Excellence in Oceans and Human Health at the University of Miami
Over the past decade, there has been increasing recognition that the ocean and the ocean-land interface are the sources of organisms and chemicals that can profoundly affect human health. The incidence of harmful algal blooms (HABs) that contaminate the food web or become aerosolized and cause respiratory disease, for example, seem to be increasing in coastal waters worldwide. Coupled with the increasing degradation of coastal waters is the fact human populations inhabiting coastal areas are growing rapidly via migration and reproduction; these two coincident characteristics have resulted in new public awareness and concern for the coastal marine environment.
With support for this Center, researchers at the University of Miami will concentrate attention on HAB-related research in the subtropical and tropical oceans adjacent or near Florida. In order to create an environment of inquiry in which oceanographic investigators and biomedical scientists are engaged in fully collaborative research, each research project at the Center will have two principal investigators, an oceanographer and a biomedical researcher. Overall, the University of Miami's Center for Subtropical and Tropical Oceans and Human Health Research in the Marine Sciences (CSTORMS) will include three Research Projects and three Core Facilities. The three Research Projects, known as Recreational Microbes (Assessment of Microbial Indicators for Monitoring Recreational Water Quality in Marine Subtropical and Tropical Environments), Toxic HABs (Toxic Algae: a General Phenomenon in Subtropical and Tropical Coastal Waters and Open Ocean Environments?), and HAB Functional Genomics (Functional Genomics of a Subtropical Harmful Algal Bloom Species: Karenia brevis Davis) are the subject of this NSF proposal. The three Facilities Cores, known as Genomics, Remote Sensing and Toxic Algal Culture, will support the research projects and are funded by NIEHS.
Recreational Microbes will investigate the present use of microbial indicators of human health effects in subtropical recreational marine waters, incorporating ongoing modeling of the physical oceanographic environment with the addition of characteristics of microbes causing or indicating public health problems on beaches. This collaboration of environmental engineers, remote sensing oceanographers, microbiologists, physical oceanographic modelers and epidemiologists hope to discover basic, predictive indicators of coastal contamination, including residence times and transport pathways of microbes. Toxic HABs will expand existing research into Harmful Algal Blooms (HABs) being conducted by the NIEHS Marine and Freshwater Biomedical Sciences Center and the NIEHS-funded Florida International University (FIU)-University of Miami (UM) ARCH Program to study population dynamics of phytoplankton species at low concentrations. Many species of dinoflagellates, cyanobacteria and other algae produce toxins that are not presently noticed by humans because those species are not dense enough to produce harmful quantities of toxins or because they are in areas of the ocean where humans are not exposed to the toxins. To better understand the molecular mechanisms and population dynamics that produce toxins, HAB Functional Genomics will investigate mRNA expression in Karenia brevis populations in bloom and non-bloom conditions in the field, quantify patterns of gene expression in K. brevis cultures exposed to different environmental conditions, and use genetic markers to describe population divergence among blooms in the field. An Administrative Office will encourage integrated interdisciplinary and inter-institutional collaboration through an outreach and education, and will be supported by Internal and External Advisory Committees.
Broader Impacts: The broader goals of CSTORMS are to foster innovative interdisciplinary scientific research of importance to human health, and to train scientists in the biological and oceanographic sciences concerning issues affecting the subtropical and tropical oceans, and their associated human populations. To accomplish its research program in subtropical/tropical oceans and human health, CSTORMS will collaborate with interdisciplinary scientists at Florida International University (FIU) (Miami, FL), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) (Atlanta, GA), the Miami Dade County Dept of Health (Miami, FL), the University of Florida (Gainesville, FL), and other institutions, as well as other Oceans and Human Health Centers.
