Team:ULaVerne Collab/integratedpractices

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INTEGRATED PRACTICES

Rachel Levin


Rachel Levin is a PhD student that studied Symbiodinium and how they get expelled due to global climate change. We discussed our initial project to her, which was upregulating the amounts of FeSOD in the cell and upregulating the amount of zeaxanthin in Symbiodinium. However, she gave advice that working with Symbiodinium might be challenging because there have been no successful transformation protocols established and they take a really long time to culture. Levin mentioned that if we wanted to work with Symbiodinium, we could make our research a research into transformation protocols that could work with Symbiodinium or she mentioned that we could work with a model organism that does photosynthesis, Chlamydomonas reinhardtii. She further suggested that we work with the genes/parts that she pulled out of Symbiodinium from one of her papers, Engineering Strategies to Decode and Enhance the Genomes of Coral Symbionts (2017). She then suggested we make a universal plasmid for Symbiodinium since nobody has made one yet and to characterize the function of FeSOD from clade C.


Madeleine van Oppen


Dr. Madeleine van Oppen focuses on studying coral reef restoration and how to help corals survive future ocean environments through assisted evolution. We discussed with her the implications of our modified project if we were to eventually release it into the ocean. However, she doesn’t really know since no one has stepped into that field, but knows that there are a lot of regulations that we would have to pass before we get to that point of releasing it into the ocean. One regulation that would need to be passed are that the organism will not affect marine life or planet negatively. Although, she was very optimistic about our project and how it could help benefit corals and marine organisms.

Madeleine is a Senior Principal Research Scientist in the "A Healthy and Resilient GBR" Program.


Arthur Grossman


Dr. Grossman focuses his research on identifying new functions associated with photosynthetic processes, the mechanisms of coral bleaching and the impact of temperature and light on the bleaching process in corals. We discussed with him about the important implications of our project if we were eventually release our modified zooxanthellae into the ocean. He was not as optimistic about our project because even if we were to upregulate SODs, it would only minisculely decrease the onset of coral bleaching as there are several other factors involved. Recently, there was a research that was conducted which shows that corals are affected from plastic waste littered in the ocean. In addition, he mentioned that there were many regulations in set for releasing modified organisms into the ocean and that we most likely will not be able to get pass. But he did agree that we need to work on preventing coral bleaching and that our project could be one of the many steps in doing so.

He was elected the co-Chair of the Gordon Research Conference on Photosynthesis in 2015, and will be Chair again in 2017. He also currently serves as Chief of Genetics at Solazyme Inc.which applies plant biology to create oils