This award provides funds to aid in purchase of equipment needed for large scale culture of marine organisms at the Columbia campus of the University of South Carolina. Although the University has already developed a strong program in marine biology, its researchers depend heavily on facilities at the Baruch Institute, which is on the coast at some distance from Columbia. The equipment will permit large scale culture of marine microorganisms and the culture and maintenance of marine animals. Key to both units is the installation of a large, recirculating seawater system that will use seawater brought from the coast by truck. The capacity and flexibility of the proposed system will permit it to satisfy current and future needs, and will permit other faculty, who do not now study marine organisms, to initiate such studies without major disruption to their current research programs. Experimental studies in marine biology have always struggled with a basic problem, the need for fresh seawater for the culture and maintenance of marine animals, plants and microorganisms. Although artificial substitutes for seawater now exist, their cost precludes their use on a large scale. Thus much marine biology has been done in specialized oceanside research laboratories which are often at considerable distance from the campuses whose faculty use them and are often used intensively only during the summer. This has tended to isolate marine biologists from other biologists, and has hindered the transfer of modern techniques, especially those of molecular biology, from other areas of biology. One solution to this problem is to truck large amounts of seawater to a university which is near, but not on the ocean, so that marine organisms can be grown "on site" is sufficient quantity for year round research programs. This solution also facilitates multi-investigator, multidisciplinary research programs that involve skilled researchers from non-marine disciplines. Such collaborations will be key to the development of new approaches to the study of marine organisms, and to the use of such organisms in biotechnology.
