welcome to the science for the public lecture series the science for the public is an organization committed to bringing science information and issues to the general public this is our website for our program  good evening i'm a fan step for science for the public and i welcome you to contemporary science issues and innovations tonight we take a look at a group of fight and organisms the foundation of marine ecosystems  two prestigious french institutions that are not for their two americans dr bowler tell us about them later in tonight's program dr buller is a scientific coordinator of the terror oceans expedition which is providing analysis of plankton at a time when climate change and marine environmental threats are causing rapid extinctions and ecosystem breakdowns in the world's oceans dr bowler's project has provided the most to help predict the future of plankton adaptation in a rapidly changing ocean and vironment dr bowler is a member of the european molecular biology organisation his awards include a silver medal from the c n r s and a foundation grand prix from the institute to france in twenty fifteen again will get some explanation of that later this sort of like the nobel friends this year he's a grass fellow at the radcliffe institute for advanced research at harvard and has very generously agreed to talk with us tonight about his work we are very honored to welcome are considered to be the most important group or find a plant and they believe to contribute something like forty percent of the photosynthesis in the ocean oh wow so that  makes them equivalent to all of the tropical rain forests on land the amazon the congo in malaysia all of those rainforests and you've got the equivalent of the role of diatoms in the ocean that  that's incredibly obviously important and they're incredibly important these days although they rose to dominance relatively late you know they they came sort of after the dinosaurs and gone extinct was when they started to really explode  in abundance so they're relatively late comers and we don't we curious to know why that is one of the things that they do which is quite unique to them is that they use silica they can take silica out of the environment and they can build the cell walls out of silica which which is glass yes so they have this hard covering like glass around the cells which probably protects them from grazes from being eaten protects them from the year you know in the ocean it takes me a few minutes to build a new cell all the beautiful elaborate you know none a meter scale structures which you know one day we can learn how to do that that can be useful for all kinds of and sequestered away at the bottom of the ocean for thousands hundreds thousands millions of years and ultimately that generates our fossil fuels our gas and our oil reserves of plankton which have sunk to the bottom of the ocean over millions a year systems in the marine ecosystems there's this other factor so there are amazing that that they could do that now you investigate these little creatures  how difficult is that and how do you proceed how do you do this examined these creatures you said that still fairly new years on one side we have oceanographic cruisers we go out and we sample we collect and we try to understand what's happening in the ocean and yours is one of the big ones yeah which is which many people do that right woods hole screen right to to yes is extremely good at doing that sort ten thousand genes most of them we don't know what they do because the diatoms pacific so to learn what they do we have to knock them out we have to activate them and we can do that using like crisper technologies and i see you know toms in the lab and so then we get an idea out of these ten thousand genes we can say ok that gene is very important in nutrient of take or something and then from those studies in the lab we can then go back out into the ocean homogeneous yeah there are there are current that move to move the organisms along sort of highways in the ocean yet there are other areas like the giants in the pacific ocean yeah to relatively stable structures or poor nutrient sort of ocean there's not five or six the way they were taught to those one ocean so any any organism in in point eight can move to point b in the so the go we had ok it may take ten thousand years but everything is connected in the ocean but cannot is not the case on land they can adapt then if they're in the pacific or in the atlantic they can switch and they w they can adapt ok so you have different you have you're looking at the genes and i presume that you're looking at the factors that may affect adaptability and so on can you sort them out can you say well i think this is an environment specifically you know and this is climate change is that yes we are trying to do that yeah a lot of what we do is sort of cases we can also go into the lab and test these sorts of hypotheses and and figure things out it we have the feeling that the diatoms do have a remarkable this is a t in the genetic repertoire mammals but we're told the both do the same thing in diatoms it seems that each of those two illegals they do different things so one of the ill will work for example in cold temperatures and the other one will work in warm temperatures so they s seem to do it you know half of their genes you know are regulated in this way you know it's remarkable and this is never really been observed before ok so it's not been observed another organisms those are not like this is not like this and interesting thing and then you can sort of sort of you're learning to distinguish what might relate to climate change and what might be specific environment or whatever so that's a goal i guess yes yes yes it is a challenge phenomena such as this a little specific it's probably evolved you know sort of the beginning of the diatoms you know hundred two hundred million years ago so that doesn't necessarily tell us about about climate change over the last year i had thought we might be very interested in what is more interesting with climate change or sort of look back over let's say the last fifty thousand years or so yes and over that fifty thousand to fifty thousand year time period we have the the human activities you have an impact on the ocean really coming during these last fifty thousand years so we would like to learn more about how diatoms of adapted over this sort of fifty thousand year yeah time period but to do that we need we need to develop special techniques to study ok and every year just like tree rings the plankton layer forms layers one on top of the other and so at the end you get this laminated structure yes which if you pull out study because using special drilling n we can pull out the d n a from phytoplankton like diatoms we can match it up with living diatoms in the ocean today and we can see how genes have changed over fifty thousand years hopefully so this is sort of i see a c i can't resist asking i hope it's ok to ask it here you were very famous for coming up with some other unique feature of diatoms that your ears cycle which must have shocked the organisms i would say it doesn't really tell us too much about about climate change over you know short of time scales but this was a remarkable finding i remember it was you know one of the few real sort of your in my scientific career we had just started sequencing some of the first genome sequences this was back in two thousand two thousand and one we got sequences from diatoms from the joint genome institute in california expressing genes and seeing what happens and so on and we basically figured out the way diatoms do it they sort of use the euro cycle in reverse it's sort of the opposite of what of what we do rather than getting rid of excess nitrogen they sort of use doesn't it and on top of that that it the uriah cycle in the diatom doesn't work for the same purpose i guess is what you're saying you know as it does in higher organisms exactly its use that the nitrogen that comes in which is made from the urea cycle ah so we know we believe that this is that these are sort of diatoms specific innovation or the so if i ask you well does this occur in in any other love the phytoplankton beginning of the origins of diatoms and related organisms the gave them a genetic toolkit you know which is sort of half plant and half and you have and then from that they could sort of pick and choose you know maybe take the best genes which were you know most most useful in in a marine setting and that together with genes that they brought in from bacteria through horizontal gene transfer which is also unique also in having this the two things plant and animal a kind of merger poss borrowing from any bacteria they feel like and so on they're really for everything are they unique that way as always we well yeah so we have a lot to learn and as you know not enough people working in the field to really make rapid progress right so it essential to have very advanced technology now but you still need people who are highly trained i guess to do this kind of really exciting work if you want to be closed up in a room and look at the g yeah yeah that capability yeah but no but it's very exciting and it's hard to do that you know because a lot of you know the money for basic research goes into biomedical research which you know which is fair enough you know we want to cure diseases what improve quality of life ye so you know environmental research always sort of comes along at second place a is just a way of the well i was going to say that this is like a fundamental science area too is that correct and that's your institution it represents i'm going to ask about that but that that is a real problem presumably everywhere we've to come back to this because we talked a little while ago about this it's a problem and in france it's a problem very serious problem here and so on well i want to ask before we get to your institution so forth though what about the implications of these findings for just for evolution you've sort of mentioned that and for other other areas of science maybe or biology in particular i think there are many things that we're learning do to help us understand how the ocean actually functions today how how we see the able to be the life support system of our planet today and what is the ocean going to look like in a hundred years time right right after you know the ocean acidify is yes it is happening quickly quickly after the the ocean loses its oxygen yes she's happening quickly temperatures are rising you know so that into the ocean is general so i think because of that we we considered it was very important to try and get a sort of global picture of what's happening in the ocean and that is why we launched  b which is a fashion company in france and years she had made and she'd accumulated a personal fortune over the decades in the fashion industry and she graciously gives gives money it's adapted to research we have like fourteen people on board which are half sailors half scientists and with this expedition over four years we went all around the world we went around the arctic circle got a special issue from science we've got five papers back to back describing our first foundational results about the state of plankton in the ocean and that was a wonderful starting point you know really now go on is more so yes the sorts of things that we discovered were the number of species in the ocean get an idea of the number of organisms that are actually present in the ocean the extent of the biodiversity within those that information together in a huge matrix and ask well who do you always find with who and who do you never find with who yes so we can build up like the social network of the of the plant and world to see who interacts with who in the ocean and that helps us to understand how these organisms interact with each other and then it helps us to understand what they do so we learn about what they're doing by looking at interactions between them and looking at genes which  being expressed which are not being expressed to try to help us to understand what they do and then to try to determine sort of why those organisms are in a particular place in a tropical region or  sort of environmental parameters which we measured also on board the ship during the expedition and so you can sort of see well which organisms are where and try to understand why are they there and what are they doing so we  in the ocean which people really didn't appreciate how important these organisms are we also found a group of organisms which are maybe the most abundant the most diverse organisms in the ocean they're called diplom emits you so much to discover in terms of the viruses we have described more than five thousand different kinds of viruses and before the expedition we knew about fifty or so like ninety nine percent of what we found is  new to science yeah guns are all kinds of opportunities to learn more about how the magnets play on it will seem like you think you're just beginning there are two things here i would like to underscore that you have done this in a complex setting that is to say within the eco system instead of taking like you know how they do with eco lie they drag it off well it's a different thing in a lab after a while compared to in a natural are putting the complex picture connecting the dots is still new is part of that due to the fact that you can do big data now so you've brought in that you have all kinds of ways of getting this data and then you can look at  institutions cns are and let's say it that way these are very prestigious institutions can you give us some idea of what they do why are they so special france that that manages most of the basic science that happens in the country doesn't really do medical research that's done by another organization but the c n r s would sort of be the equivalent of the n yes right in the past that was you know that was what kept a lot of the science going in france because people had permanent position as an ee they could move forward you know but surely but these days you know dislike in the us you know the funding for basic research is being cut young people are really suffering young people leaving science because they don't really see much of a future in basic science very sadly we don't have the biotech companies that you have in the institutions are are really outstanding and the permanence factor was a big thing i hope they will turn around of changing yes that's just intellectually they're both absolutely up there both absolutely outstanding i think in general the year that the harvard students tend to be more excited about moving forward and really doing something new and doing something right exactly so we don't really know how we're going to come up come through this this dark period right but i think you know it's the creativity of the young people that that we have to we have to that it's true and also since so much work is global now these these huge international teams and so on that cannot be broken at this point but it's a question of getting governments apparently all over the world to commit funds to this this research and to understand how important it is long range your search and surely it will happen and in time we certainly have our difficulties here with that i also believe that philanthropic organizations can do a lot there are some organizations that are already doing a lot i think you know rather than investing in oil and yes rules you know use they have done traditionally it's time for these countries these these foundations to stop by and try to you know funding basic research right to killer with respect to climate oceans you know because these are global issues and you know national it's global they almost don't need the state anymore and that mindset around this but there's a great need to commit funding for this public and maybe pride as well i i hope that the philanthropic organizations will will step up and now the police deal with these global problems exactly to face climate change to to understand how the earth system works yet it's a basic research problem biology it's something that we need help to do at an international level and i hope these philanthropic organizations can can step up and help us to do that right i was sorry for that we're out of time and i would really love to hear more thank you ever so much for giving your time that was very generous i know this is a busy year for you they all are for this is the particularly busy perhaps while you're at radcliff