Where are you from, and what is your role in Extreme 2004?

I am a third-year Ph.D. student at the University of Oregon. My role on the ship, as part of the science crew, will be to assist in the collection of Alvinella pompejana (the Pompeii worm) and to run experiments to learn more about how this animal interacts with and adapts to its changing environment.

What questions are you trying to answer and why?

Pompeii worms live in tubes that are built on the sides of hydrothermal vents. This means that they are surrounded by swiftly changing environmental conditions, including high temperatures, high levels of hydrogen sulfide, and low oxygen. I have been using cDNA microarrays (a microscope slide containing small spots of several thousand genes) to examine, at the molecular level, how the Pompeii worm deals with its environment. I am especially interested in heat-shock genes, which are present in most animals -- including the Pompeii worm -- and become turned "on" when an animal is exposed to high temperatures.

In the past, we have not been able to take an experimental approach to understanding how the Pompeii worm functions in its natural environment because it was thought that they could not be brought to the surface alive. The deep sea is an environment of high pressure so when animals are brought to the surface, where there is only atmospheric pressure, it can damage their tissues. Recent work has shown that if you put Pompeii worms back at deep - sea pressure, they are actually still alive and will become active again! We're going to try some experiments first to see if we can re-pressurize worms at the surface and keep them alive and active. If this works, we hope to put them at different temperatures and compare gene expression of these animals to some of the information we have for worms taken directly from the vents. This will hopefully help us understand more about the temperatures the Pompeii worm experiences in its natural environment.

Why is this research important? What are the benefits?

By examining the gene expression in the Pompeii worm, we hope to gain more insight about the biology of this organism at the molecular level. Hopefully, with what we discover with Alvinella -- which lives in an extreme environment compared to many other species -- we may begin to understand more about how animals become adapted to different environmental conditions and the molecular mechanisms that allow the Pompeii worm to live at such high temperatures compared to other animals.

What is your background and what lured you into marine science/education?

I've always been interested in the ocean, but growing up in Colorado, there weren't many opportunities to study it firsthand. As an undergraduate at Colorado State University in biology, I took an internship at the Seward Sea-Life Center in Seward, Alaska. There, I helped researchers study the behavioral and physiological effects of telemetry (tracking) devices used after rehabilitation efforts to track sea birds. I also helped with rehabilitation of marine mammals (like otters and baby seals), as well as feeding and cleaning lots of different marine invertebrates and fish at the center. I discovered that I loved working with marine animals while working there because even though I spent a lot of time cleaning up after them, I enjoyed every minute of it!

After graduating with a B.S. in general biology, I moved to Monterey, California, and began working as a laboratory technician at Stanford University's Hopkins Marine Station. There, I worked with scientists on several projects looking at the effects of environmental stress — such as hypoxia (low oxygen), high or low temperature, and changes in salinity — on marine animals. My two years at Hopkins helped me realize that I wished to continue to learn about how marine animals interact with their environments.

After beginning my Ph.D. at the University of Oregon, I decided that I wanted to use molecular biology to try and understand those interactions. Drs. Eric Johnson and Andy Berglund introduced me to the Pompeii worm microarray project because of my interest in animals and the environments they live in. We are collaborating with Dr. Craig Cary and his group, who work on the important bacteria living on the Pompeii worm's back.