Subject Area
Biological Oceanography
Marine Ecology
Activities
Research in the Amaral-Zettler laboratory investigates the relationships between microbes and the environment, focusing on mechanisms that determine microbial diversity, distribution, survival, and impact on local and global processes. Working in diverse environments ranging from pH extreme freshwaters to oligotrophic open-ocean systems the unifying goal of her research is to explain patterns of microbial diversity and distribution over space and time, to understand how microbial communities are formed, and to reveal the role they play in ecosystem functioning. From 2004-2010 she served as the Program Manager for the International Census of Marine Microbes (ICoMM; www.icomm.mbl) during the Census of Marine Life's decade of discovery. She led the NSF-funded MIRADA-LTERS project that carried out all-taxon microbial biodiversity inventories and is exploring large-scale patterns in microbial biogeography across the 13 aquatic US Long Term Ecological Research Sites. As part of the Woods Hole Center for Oceans and Human Health, her laboratory employs next generation sequencing techniques to understand the presence and persistence of pathogens and harmful algal blooming species in the natural and man-made environment, and pathogen pollution along trade routes via the aquarium fish pet trade. With collaborators she is probing the diversity, function and fate of microbes inhabiting plastic marine debris in the open ocean, a community known as the Plastisphere. Her research spans the fields of microbial ecology, molecular ecology, molecular evolution, cell-physiology, phylogenetics, comparative molecular biology and biogeography.
Skills
Microbial ecology, biological oceanography, molecular biology, phylogenetics, genomics, transcriptomics, biogeography
Working language(s)
English
Spanish
Italian
Portuguese
