Dr. Bryce Inman
Projekte & Publikationen
Throughout the world’s oceans, mucus from algae and dead cells clumps together and sinks to the deep in a flurry of “marine snow”. These sinking balls of mucus can store carbon dioxide from the atmosphere in the abyssal ocean for millennia, if they can reach the bottom. Their ultimate fate depends on how fast they sink versus how quickly bacteria digest them, but we have never determined how those two processes influence each other. Using a microscopy technology that I developed recently, we can now visualize the 3D nanoscale viscosity inside of marine snow (how “honey-like” they are) and use it to connect bacterial breakdown of a mucus aggregate to its density and sinking speed. To succeed, this interdisciplinary project requires experts in microscopy (Rudolf Amann, MPI Bremen), biopolymer chemistry (Jan-Hendrik Hehemann, MARUM), marine snow physics (Morten Iversen, AWI), and enzyme proteomics (A. Murat Eren, ICBM), who are fortunately all located close to Delmenhorst. A HWK fellowship will bring my expertise in microscale biophysics and the viscosity microscopy method to Northern Germany to uncover a key process in the ocean carbon sink.