Jeff Bowman
University of California-San Diego, CA·Earth & Environmental Science
Ocean microbes take in organic carbon. They either build it into new cells or burn it, releasing carbon dioxide through respiration.
- Fields
Earth & Environmental Science
Microbiology & Immunology
Ecology & Evolution
- Topics
microbial growth efficiency
marine microbes
microbial ecology
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Aug 2027
What they work on
- Identify the ecological conditions and microbial taxa that explain variation in microbial growth efficiency along light and nutrient gradients in the California Current ecosystem.
- Estimate energy conversion within microbial cells using two new radioisotope tracer techniques combined with flow cytometry, and compare it with respiration and primary production measurements.
- Use machine learning to link microbial community structure, abundance, growth efficiency, and environmental data such as nutrients, oxygen, temperature and pH, in order to predict carbon flow.
- Incorporate environmental and community measurements from diverse ocean settings into mathematical models that interpret and predict microbial carbon flow.
More about the research
The balance between the two is called microbial growth efficiency. This balance helps set how much carbon stays in marine food webs and how much is lost as carbon dioxide. Yet scientists know little about what drives it, partly because the energy cells spend making biomass is hard to measure directly. This collaborative project asks where and why microbes in the upper few hundred meters of the ocean turn carbon into biomass most efficiently.
Why it matters
Microbial growth efficiency helps decide how much ocean carbon is kept in food webs and how much is released as carbon dioxide. Pinning down which microbes and conditions control this efficiency could improve models of how carbon moves through the ocean. These improved models could help predict carbon flow in coastal and open-ocean ecosystems like the California Current.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Henry Williams
Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University, FL·Microbiology & Immunology
Measure how rising temperature, ocean acidification and nutrient enrichment change the abundance and predation rates of Bdellovibrio-like bacteria and other micropredators, using time-series experiments sampled every 3–6 hours.
Brook Nunn
University of Washington, WA·Earth & Environmental Science
Test whether daily (diel) metabolic schedules of chemical exchange among plankton persist in a dynamic coastal ecosystem, using diel time-series samples taken before, during and after blooms near Orcas Island, Washington.
Jodi Young
University of Washington, WA·Earth & Environmental Science·Early-career
Measure how different sympagic algal species adapt their growth and cell properties to seasonal sea ice formation and melt, using a laboratory ice tank modeled on Antarctic Peninsula conditions.
The school
University of California-San Diego: 84 labs on PI Pages, $1.9B a year on research, 637 research doctorates a year.
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