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IsoBank – Stable Isotope Research + Open Data

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The use of stable isotopes (the non-radioactive form of an element) has become increasingly prevalent in a wide variety of scientific research fields. The fact that many elements have stable isotopes, which exhibit unique properties, allows for their distribution and ratios in natural environments to be measured. These data can be used to shed insight on the history, fate and transport of elements in water, soil and even archeological specimens. Our curated collection of research using stable isotopes highlights the diversity of fields that utilize these invaluable measurements.

To meet the needs of this growing research community, and to facilitate accessibility and data sharing, the US National Science Foundation has funded the IsoBank project – a common repository for stable isotope data.

Here, we chat with some of the IsoBank organizers about the importance of the project, and how they use stable isotopes in their own research.


Jonathan Pauli is an Associate Professor in the Department of Forest and Wildlife Ecology at University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research explores the response of mammal populations and communities to human disturbance, particularly as it relates to developing effective conservation strategies. He works in diverse ecosystems and employs a variety of techniques, from traditional ones like live capture, radiotelemetry and observation to more advanced ones involving molecular markers, stable isotopes and population modeling to answer questions relating to mammalian ecology and conservation.


Gabriel Bowen is a Professor of Geology and Geophysics and member of the Global Change and Sustainability Center at the University of Utah, where he leads the Spatio-temporal Isotope Analytics Lab (SPATIAL) and serves as co-director of the SIRFER stable isotope facility. His research focuses on the use of spatial and temporally resolved geochemical data to study Earth system processes ranging from coupled carbon and water cycle change in geologic history to the movements of modern and near-modern humans. In addition to fundamental research, he has been active in developing cyberinformatics tools and training programs supporting the use of large-scale environmental geochemistry data across a broad range of scientific disciplines, including the waterisotopes.org and IsoMAP.org web sites and the Inter-University Training for Continental-scale Ecology training program.


Brian Hayden is an Assistant Professor in Food Web Ecology at the University of New Brunswick, Canada, where he leads the Stable Isotopes in Nature Laboratory. His research focuses on the trophic responses to environmental change, predominantly in aquatic systems — he considers himself extremely fortunate to collaborate with researchers around the globe addressing these issues.


Seth Newsome is an animal ecology and eco-physiologist whose research blends biochemical, morphometric, and phylogenetic analyses to provide a holistic understanding of the role of energy transport in the assembly and maintenance of biological communities. He is the Associate Director of the University of New Mexico (UNM) Center for Stable Isotopes and an Associate Professor in the UNM Biology Department. Besides science and fixing mass spectrometers, he enjoys mountain biking, rafting, and fly fishing.


Oliver Shipley is an applied ecologist at the University of New Mexico, with training in a suite of laboratory and field techniques. He is broadly interested in food-web dynamics and animal ecophysiology and employs a suite of chemical tracer and biotelemetry approaches to investigate these processes with a strong focus on marine ecosystems. His research can be defined by three interconnected themes 1) defining the drivers and food web implications of ecological niche variation at various levels of biological organization, 2) applying ecophysiological principles to predict the timing of important biological events, 3) investigating the fitness consequences of niche variation for food web and broader ecosystem dynamics.

Research using stable isotopes spans a wide array of fields, from the geosciences to ecology to archeology – has organizing the IsoBank group highlighted the different forms that isotopic research can take? Have there been any challenges in communication with scientists of such varied backgrounds?

BH: This is one of the main challenges we faced when developing IsoBank. Isotopes have huge a diversity of applications and researchers working in environmental, ecological, and archaeological isotope systems have developed metadata relevant to their specific discipline. Our goal was to build a single large database capable to serving all of these disciplines, which meant we needed to somehow combine all of the distinct metadata into a single framework. This can be challenging within a field; for example, most of my research involves freshwater fish but much the information I use to describe a datapoint, (e.g., habitat, organism size, tissue type) may or may not be relevant to ecologists studying birds, insects or plants. Working across disciplines exacerbates things considerably. For example, ‘date’ means very different things to ecologists, archaeologists, and paleoecologists, despite us all using the same techniques. We tried to address this by developing core metadata terms which are common to all disciplines and therefore required in order for a datapont to be uploaded to IsoBank, and discipline specific optional metadata terms which can be selected by the user.

JP: Indeed, one of the greatest assets of IsoBank is also one of its greatest challenges. Because isotopes span so many different disciplines – e.g., environmental, geological, archaeological, biomedical, ecological, physiological – there are a variety of discipline-specific metadata that are needed. To accommodate these different needs, we have convened a number of working group meetings to bring together experts within these disciplines to identify what metadata are necessary, and fold them into a single and operational framework. I’ve been impressed, though, that our discussions with scientists with such varied interests and backgrounds have been able to effectively communicate what is needed. I’d even offer that these discussions with other people, employing isotopes for different questions, has been a highlight of this project for me personally and has expanded my thinking and generated new ideas of application to my own work.

Tell us about how you use stable isotopes in your own research.

BH: I think I am drawn to isotopes because of the diversity of the applications of the techniques, it’s such a useful tool the only limit is our imagination. I am an aquatic ecologist at heart – my research focuses on understanding how aquatic ecosystems, especially food webs, respond to environmental change. Initially I used isotopes to improve our understanding of the trophic ecology of specific species, but over time this has changed to a community level perspective.

GB: Isotopes are incredibly powerful tracers of the flow of matter (including organisms!) through the environment. Many of the applications in my research group leverage this potential in one way or another. We use isotopes in water to understand hydrological connectivity – how rain falling in different seasons or weather systems contributes to water resources or plant water uptake and transpriation. We use isotope values of solutes to better understand biogeochemical cycles – sources of carbon stored in soils or how mineral weathering in different systems contributes to global geochemical cycling. We use isotope values measured in human and animal tissues to map the movement of individuals – migration pathways, sources of potentially poached game, or the childhood residence location of the victims of violent crime.

SN: As an animal ecologist and eco-physiologist, I’m interested in tracing the flow of energy within and among organisms, which is governed by species interactions and food web structure. To do so, I meld isotopic, morphometric, and phylogenetic analyses to provide a holistic understanding of the role of energy transport in the assembly and maintenance of ecological communities. I use lab-based feeding experiments in which the stable isotope composition and concentrations of dietary macromolecules are varied to understand how animals process dietary macromolecules to build and maintain tissues. I use this information to quantify niche breadth from individual to community-levels to better understand the energetic basis of community assembly and structure. Finally, I adopt a broad temporal perspective by comparing species interactions in modern versus ancient ecosystems, providing the full range of behavioral and ecological flexibility important for designing effective management strategies and assessing a species sensitivity to environmental change.

JP: I am a community ecologist and conservation biologist, and am interested in the biotic interplay between organisms that ultimately shape community structure and dynamics, and how we can predict these interactions into the future and within emerging novel environments. To that end, I use isotopes to understand animal foraging and trophic identities and combine these data with fieldwork studying animal behavior, movement and space use as well as species distributions and abundances. After developing a better understanding of contemporary community structure and interactions, I use this information to explore past communities and project what future communities will look like and how they will behave. 

You recently organized the IsoEcol workshop to provide researchers in the Ecology community with training on sharing their data through IsoBank. How has IsoBank allowed for better collaboration in the ecological sciences community? Are there any particular themes or questions that have arisen?

OS: We were extremely excited to host the first IsoBank workshop for the broader research community at this years IsoEcol – this was held in an online format through Zoom. The workshop provided participants with a brief history of IsoBank’s development but focused heavily on the metadata structure and data ingest process. Since the workshop we have received many new modern and historical datasets across terrestrial, freshwater and marine systems. As we continue to ingest a growing number of datasets, the collaborative potential of IsoBank becomes increasingly realized. This moves us closer to exciting questions that can be addressed using the big-data model IsoBank will soon support. At the last IsoBank workshop we identified several potential research priorities that can be addressed in the coming years, these include but are by no means limited to 1) the development of novel isoscapes (spatial interpolations of stable isotope data) and 2) broadscale patterns in animal trophic interactions and broader food-web dynamics.  

Oliver, for Early Career Researchers, being part of a robust and supportive research community can be instrumental to growth as a scientist and to career success. How has your involvement in the IsoBank project led to opportunities that you may not have otherwise had?

OS: As a postdoctoral research fellow, it has been an extremely rewarding experience serving as the project manager for IsoBank. One of the primary reasons I was excited to work on IsoBank, were the potential collaborative and networking opportunities facilitated by the projects diverse userbase. Since I began working with the IsoBank team, and extended userbase I have formed new collaborations with researchers across the US and Europe. For example, working closely with Drs Seth Newsome (University of New Mexico, USA) and Bailey McMeans (University of Toronto Mississauga, CA) we are using stable isotopes of individual amino acids to understand how energy flow mediates the nutritional condition in lake trout. Further, in collaboration with PhD student Lucien Besnard (University of Western Brittany, France) we are building mercury stable isotope clocks to quantifying the age at which scalloped hammerhead sharks migrate from inshore nurseries to offshore foraging grounds. These exciting opportunities have been possible through working with IsoBanks advisory committee and the repositories diverse userbase. 

Gabe, you were one of the first people to use the term “isoscape”, which has since become a hallmark of numerous scientific studies. What is an isoscape, and how do they feature in your research?

GB: Isoscapes are quantitative models representing spatiotemporal isotopic variation in any natural or anthropogenic system…they are isotopic maps. And I think they embody the biggest reason we need IsoBank. Isoscapes are useful because almost any isotopic measurement needs to be interpreted in the context of reference data. We can use isotope values of animal tissues to understand the individual’s diet, but only if we know the isotope values of the foods it might eat. We can use isotope values of groundwater to assess where and when recharge occurred, but only if we know the isotopic compositions of those potential sources. Isoscapes are generated by combining isotopic datasets with statistical or process models to predict the values we would expect for sources at different locations and times, and we can make isoscapes for different substrates. Whether they are used to support the development of isoscapes, or more directly as reference data for a local study, access to the vast wealth of isotopic data that our different communities have produced is a critical limitation for most isotopic studies.

In some environments, stable isotope ratios alone do not provide sufficiently detailed information. What combination of techniques or analytical methods do you use to yield more conclusive results and to elucidate unseen patterns or trends?

BH: As isotope ecologists, we are often drawn to using techniques which have worked well for us in the past, but it’s always important to remember that isotope analysis is just another tool in our kit. In my work, I typically use isotopes to understand trophic interactions. They can fill in a lot of the gaps other methods of diet analysis leave open, but they still just provide one piece of the puzzle. Isotopes are a really nice way of getting a broad idea of what a specific consumer is doing or what sources of primary production are most important to a food web, but for questions which require more detailed answer, such as whether consumers are feeding on specific species of prey, isotopes may be limited. We typically use isotopes in combination with diet analyses, fatty acid analysis or even mercury analysis to get a more complete understanding of the community we are interested in. Sometimes the best insights come when different techniques give contrasting results, that can really help us to understand the complexity of the ecological systems we are studying.

SN: Stable isotope analysis has become a standard tool in animal ecology because it can provide time-integrated measures of diet composition, albeit at a limited taxonomic resolution. As such, a new frontier is combining isotope analysis with proxies that can identify the taxonomic composition of animal diets, such as fecal DNA metabarcoding. The advantage of combining these two dietary proxies is that their respective strengths complement the weaknesses of the other. Specifically, fecal metabarcoding provides high-resolution taxonomic information for recently consumed (~24 hours) resources, but estimating the proportional consumption and assimilation of individual resources is confounded by assumptions about the relative digestibility of different foods. In contrast, isotope analysis provides a time-integrated measure of resource assimilation with low taxonomic resolution often only capable of discriminating between plant functional groups (e.g., C3 or C4) and providing an estimate of relative trophic level for consumers. Such multi-proxy metrics will transform how animal ecologists use diet composition data to understand foraging strategies, species interactions, and food web structure.

PLOS is dedicated to Open Science, which expands upon the notion of Open Access to include concepts such as Open Data. Do you envision IsoBank changing data sharing and transparency amongst the stable isotopes community? – And what impact will this have on scientific research?

BH: This was one of the driving force behind our desire to develop IsoBank. Jon Pauli, Seth Newsome, and another colleague, Dr. Shawn Stefan, wrote an opinion article in Bioscience in 2014 highlighting how isotope ecology was at a similar position to molecular ecology when GenBank was developed. We had all seen how crucial GenBank had become to molecular ecology by facilitating new science from old data and felt that IsoBank could have a similar effect on the ecological, geological, and anthropological sciences. So much of our work is still being done in relative isolation, the knowledge gained from our research is available through our papers; but unless the data are readily available in a usable and publicly accessible format, they will end up being stored in a hard drive on someone’s computer. This limits our ability to do large scale metanalysis or continental-global scale spatial studies using isotopes. Our hope is that IsoBank will allow us to generate new insights by combining many small datasets.

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Introducing the Life in Extreme Environments Collection

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Written by Daniel Colman (Guest Editor, Montana State University), Ruth Blake (Guest Editor, Yale University) and Hanna Landenmark (Associate Editor, PLOS ONE).

We are delighted to introduce a Collection entitled Life in Extreme Environments, consisting of papers published in PLOS Biology and PLOS ONE. This interdisciplinary Collection helps us better understand the diversity of life on Earth in addition to the biological processes, geochemistry, and nutrient cycling taking place in many of the Earth’s most inhospitable environments, while also enabling us to make inferences about the potential for life beyond Earth. Microorganisms and other life in extreme environments are fundamental agents of geochemical and nutrient cycling in many of the most poorly understood environments on Earth. While we tend to think of these environments as lying at the boundaries of what life is capable of dealing with, many organisms are uniquely adapted to thrive in habitats at the extremes of temperatures, pressures, water availability, salinity, and other environmental characteristics. Indeed, these environments are certainly not “extreme” to these organisms, but represent their unique niches within ecosystems on Earth. The papers included in this Collection bring together research from different disciplines including the biosciences, geosciences, planetary sciences, and oceanography in order to shed light on this crucial topic.

We are immensely grateful to our Guest Editor team- Paola Di Donato (Università degli Studi di Napoli “Parthenope”), Jiasong Fang (Hawaii Pacific University), David Pearce (Northumbria University), Anna Metaxas (Dalhousie University), Henrik Sass (Cardiff University), Ruth Blake (Yale University), Daniel Colman (Montana State University), Karen Olsson-Francis (The Open University), Frank Reith (The University of Adelaide), Felipe Gómez (Centro de Astrobiología, Instituto Nacional de Técnica Aeronáutica)- for curating this Collection.

The importance of studying life in extreme environments

It is important to study life in extreme environments in order to establish life’s limits – both physical and geographic (e.g., the depth of life beneath the seafloor), as well as the capacity of life to withstand and adapt to change. Besides significantly expanding our understanding of the limits of familiar and extreme life on Earth, studies in extreme environments have also revised our understanding of the nature of the earliest life on our planet, as well as providing the possibility of discovering new industrially useful organisms or biological products. Moreover, if there is life on other planetary bodies in our solar system or elsewhere, they will almost certainly be living in what we consider “extreme environments” on Earth. Thus, understanding how life copes with what we consider extreme conditions can provide insight into how life may be able to persist on other planetary bodies, perhaps in the subsurface oceans of Saturn’s moon, Enceladus, or Jupiter’s moon, Europa.

Investigating extreme life

One of the most exciting aspects of researching extreme life is the exploration of the unknown and discovery of new things in unexpected places that expands our very way of thinking. Microbial life, in particular, has evolved to find a way to exist and even thrive pretty much everywhere we have looked so far. Moreover, contemporary research of extremophiles is happening at an exciting time when the lines between scientific fields have been increasingly blurred. The more we understand about how environments not only influence life in extreme environments, but how life also influences those environments, the more apparent it becomes that extreme ecosystems are dynamic systems with feedback between biological activities and ecosystem properties. These interdisciplinary perspectives certainly invigorate the study of extreme life.

Extremophile research is often interdisciplinary by nature, perhaps due to the close association with biological organisms and their ecosystems, and thus the need to consider environmental, geologic, ecological, physiological, and even evolutionary considerations when investigating how organisms are able to push the limits of life. The challenges can be considerable due to the need to integrate across many disciplines, which requires expertise in a number of areas (and requiring scientists across disciplines to productively engage one another). But the reward for conducting this type of research is that it can transform how we view the relationships between living organisms and their environments. These insights can be profound in terms of our understanding of organismal biology and broader evolutionary processes of adaptation.

Yet, by their very nature, extreme environments pose significant challenges for studying biological life within them. This can be due to their remote locations (e.g., deep sea environments, high altitude environments), or to specific dangers associated with studying them (e.g., geothermal fields or other volcanic environments). Indeed, the reason that these environments are considered “extreme” is because they are not amenable to humans spending much time within them. It takes serious dedication and preparation to execute scientific research under such conditions.

The future of extremophile research

The last 30-40 years have reshaped our understanding of life in extreme environments, but much remains to be discovered. As one example, we’re still only beginning to understand what types of microbial life can exist in extreme environments, let alone what the physiological adaptations of these organisms might be. One of the greatest questions in the study of life in extreme environments i whether life is present in other “extreme environments” of the Universe beyond our planet. While we cannot know whether answers to this question will be forthcoming in the near future, great strides are being made in pointing us in what may be the most likely directions.

The Life in Extreme Environments Collection

This Collection showcases a wide variety of research on how life, from microorganisms like bacteria, archaea, diatoms, and algae, through to macroorganisms like humans, survive and flourish in diverse extreme environments, ranging from hydrothermal vents and the deep ocean to permafrosts and hypersaline lakes, and from the high Andes to deep space. Many papers illustrate highly interdisciplinary approaches and collaborations, and provide important insights into the limits of life on Earth in truly extreme environments. As indicated above, extremophiles provide insight into far-ranging topics like the limits of life on Earth, biogeochemical cycling in extreme but globally important environments, insights into early life on Earth, and how organisms cope with conditions that push the boundaries of organismal physiology.

A critical component of extremophile research is understanding how extremophiles are distributed across environments in both contemporary settings as well as over geologic time. Serpentinizing environments are considered to be analogs for the environments where life originated on Earth (and that may also support life on other planetary bodies). The investigation of fully serpentinized rocks by Khilyas et al. document the endolithic (i.e., within-rock dwelling) microbial diversity within these unique environments, their associations with their mineral environments, and contrast their findings with those of active serpentinizing aqueous environments. Such studies examining the connection between extreme environments and their native microbiomes can be critical for understanding how organisms have and continue to interact with their environments over time. Another study in the Collection by Kiel and Peckmann provides new insights into the association of macrofauna with hydrothermal vents over the past ~550 million years. Their survey of dominant brachiopod and bivalve fossils over this period challenge the pre-existing hypotheses that these two groups competed for the same resources, with the latter group ultimately gaining prominence in the last ~100 million years. However, the authors show that the two groups likely inhabited different vent environments altogether, with brachiopods inhabiting hydrocarbon seeps and bivalves preferring sulfide-producing vents in association with their symbiotic sulfide oxidizing bacteria. To better understand the contemporary distributions of important marine microorganisms, Ferreira da Silva et al. documented how diatom communities are associated with macroalgae in the waters near the South Shetland Islands of Antarctica, revealing a potential role of the unique Antarctic climate in determining the biogeography of diatoms and their associated macroalgae. Indeed, the relationships among organisms may be critical for the habitation of extreme environments. In another investigation of cross-taxa associations in extreme environments, Gallet et al. evaluated the diversity of microbiota associated with enigmatic bioluminescent lantern fish species, and found that the latter might interact with its microbiome to inhabit the extreme environment of deep southern oceans. The data provide a better understanding of these important associations in key species involved in the ecosystem function of extreme deep sea environments.

Although extreme environments are often considered marginal habitats of mostly local influence, the functions of some extreme environments, and the organisms inhabiting them, can have particularly important implications for global biogeochemical cycling. For example, Nayak et al. document new insights into the functioning of one of the most important microbial enzymes involved in global carbon cycling, the methyl-coenzyme M reductase protein of methanogens, which catalyzes the key step of methanogenesis allowing the biological production of methane, which contributes to a significant portion of global methane production. In the authors’ investigation, they show how the protein is post-translationally modified by a previously unknown mechanism, and that this ‘tuning’ of methyl-coenzyme M reductase has profound impacts on the adaptation of methanogens to various environmental conditions. Anoxic peatlands are one such environment where methanogens play critical roles in biogeochemical cycling. These anoxic peatland environments are extreme environments that are important for global biogeochemical cycling, despite only occupying a small fraction of the total land space. Kluber et al. used an experimental warming approach to investigate how deep, anoxic peatland reserves would respond to fluctuating environmental conditions. The authors document that temperature is a key parameter that could drastically affect the decomposition of peatland nutrient stocks and their contribution to global biogeochemical cycling.

Key to the interaction between organisms and extreme environments are the adaptations that extreme environments impose upon organisms. The Collection features a number of investigations documenting the unique adaptations of microorganisms and macroorganisms to habitats ranging from hydrothermal vents to space at both the genomic and physiological levels. One of the most enigmatic discoveries of extreme environments over the past half century was the identification of entire ecosystems that dwell on or around hydrothermal vents at the ocean floor that are sustained by inorganic chemical synthesis from hydrothermal vent fluid chemicals. The paper within this Collection by Zhu et al. provides new evidence for the genetic mechanisms that allow the habitation of vent ecosystems by two distinct shrimp species that characteristically inhabit different thermal regions of vents. Using transcriptomic approaches, the authors identified new molecular mechanisms underlying how macrofauna can adapt to different hydrothermal niches within these extreme systems. Likewise, Díaz-Riaño et al. used transcriptomics to identify the mechanisms of ultraviolet radiation resistance (UVR) within high UVR bacterial strains that were isolated from high altitudes within the Colombian Andes. These new insights provide much needed resolution into the RNA-based regulatory mechanisms underlying UVR in organisms, which represents a fundamental knowledge-gap in our understanding of organismal adaptations to extreme altitude environments.

While life that persists continuously under extreme environments provide valuable information to understand the physiological limits of life, it is also critical to understand how life adapted to more ‘normal’ environments can withstand excursions to extreme environments over prolonged periods of time. One such example are oxygen minimum zones that occur in deep oceans where oxygen levels have been depleted to levels thought to not be able to support higher life, in what is termed ‘hypoxic conditions’. Nevertheless, some higher organisms are capable of living in such environments, although their adaptations to this lifestyle are not currently clear. One such species is the bluntnose sixgill shark that can tolerate very low levels of oxygen. Using an array of biologging techniques that allowed them to monitor the physiological and behavioral activities of these sharks, Coffey et al. provide evidence for their migratory behavior and long periods of exposure to hypoxic conditions in the deep sea. In addition to elucidating how sixgill sharks cope with extreme deep sea conditions, the new ecophysiological logging techniques provide a new platform for future studies of organisms adapted to the extremes of deep oceans. Among the possible excursions of life to extreme environments, none are potentially more problematic than the travel of humans to space. A common physiological effect of space transit is the bone mineral density (BMD) loss that is experienced by astronauts. In a paper within the Collection, Axpe et al., performed a modeling analysis based on BMD loss by previous astronauts involved in long-term missions in order to evaluate the potential for these harmful effects on trips that might become targets for longer manned missions to Mars or elsewhere. The study thus provides critical new data to inform these important missions.

As exemplified by the papers within this Collection, unique adaptations allow life to persist in extreme environments. These adaptations can also be useful in biotechnological applications, as several other papers in the Collection demonstrate. Halophiles that inhabit extremely saline environments have long been a source for bioprospecting due to their unique adaptations that allow them to maintain osmotic balance within environments that most types of life could not survive in. Notably, halophiles often concentrate unique biomolecules in order to overcome the abiotic stress of hypersaline environments. In their manuscript, Abdollahnia et al.  explore the previously little-investigated ability of halophiles to concentrate nanoparticles, finding evidence for the unique ability to concentrate metal nanoparticles within archaeal and bacterial species. Importantly, these organisms could represent a potential environmentally-friendly means of synthesizing unique metal nanoparticles. Thus, the identification of new bio-resources is an area of ongoing and intense interest in the investigation of extreme life.

As is evident by the diverse range of topics, organisms, and environments within the papers of this Collection, the investigation of extreme life incorporates numerous fields of study and a wealth of methods to understand the limits to life on Earth. We’ll be adding new papers to the Collection as they are published, so please do keep checking back.

About the Guest Editors

Ruth Blake

Ruth Blake is a Professor in the departments of Geology & Geophysics and Environmental Engineering, and in the School of Forestry & Environmental Studies at Yale University. Dr. Blake’s areas of expertise include marine biogeochemistry, stable isotope geochemistry and geomicrobiology. Her recent work focuses on developing new stable isotope tools, geochemical proxies and biomarkers to study marine/microbial phosphorus cycling and evolution of the phosphorus cycle from pre-biotic to recent.

Dr. Blake is engaged in a range of studies on co- evolution of earth and life and the impacts of both on biogeochemical processes occurring in the oceans, deep-sea sediments, seafloor hydrothermal systems and the sub-seafloor deep biosphere. Dr. Blake has participated in several ocean exploration/ research expeditions including cruises to: FeMO observatory at Loihi undersea volcano, 9°N EPR, Orca Basin in the Gulf of Mexico and North Pond in the mid-Atlantic. She has also served as shipboard scientist on Ocean Drilling Program and R/V Atlantis /DSV ALVIN platforms. Ruth Blake graduated from the University of Michigan in 1998 with a PhD in geochemistry.

Daniel Colman

Dan is currently an assistant research professor at Montana State University and is an environmental microbiologist with primary research interests in broadly understanding how microbial populations interact with one another and with their environments. To investigate these broad topics, he uses a suite of interdisciplinary techniques at the intersection of environmental microbiology, biogeochemistry, geomicrobiology, microbial physiology, geochemistry, hydrology, and microbial evolution.

In particular, his work leverages environmental genomics methods coupled to in situ and laboratory experiments along with geochemical insights from hydrological and geochemical analyses to understand 1) how and why environments structure micobial communities, 2) how microbial communities shape their environments, and 3) how environments and microbial populations have co- evolved through time. In particular, he has largely focused on evaluating these questions in extreme environments, and especially hydrothermal systems, which represent an excellent platform to deconvolute microbial-environment relationships across substantial environmental gradients.

Paola Di Donato

Graduated in Chemistry, Paola received her PhD in 2002 and since 2008 she is a Researcher in Biochemistry at the Department of Science and Technology of University of Naples “Parthenope”; in 2016 she has been appointed as the Dean’s delegate to managing the Institutional Repository of the University “Parthenope”.

Her research interests are the valorisation of waste vegetable biomass and the study of extremophilic bacteria. With regard to the first topic, her research focuses on the recovery of value added chemicals (polysaccharides and polyphenols) and the production of energy (bioethanol) from wastes of vegetables food industry and of dedicated crops (giant reed, cardoon). With regard to the study of extremophilic bacteria, her research activity is aimed at studying the biotechnologically useful biomolecules (enzymes and exopolysaccharides) produced by these bacteria; in the last seven years, particular attention has been paid to the study of extremophiles in relation to Astrobiology, the multidisciplinary approach to the study of origin and evolution of life on Earth and in the Universe.

Felipe Gómez

Dr. Felipe Gómez is a senior staff scientist at the CAB. His research work focuses on the study of extreme environments, limits of life and, by extrapolation, development of habitability potential in adverse environments. He participates in Mars exploration space missions to search for traces of life and study the habitability potential of the red planet. He is currently part of the scientific team (Co-Investigator) of the Rover Environmental Monitoring Station (REMS) instrument aboard the NASA Curiosity-MSL rover that is studying the surface of Mars at this time. Dr. Felipe Gómez is Co-I of MEDA instrument that will be onboard Mars2020 NASA mission to Mars.

He has been part of the scientific team of several campaigns of astrobiological interest in studying different extreme environments. The project M.A.R.T.E. (Mars Analogue Research and Technology Development) began in 2003 and extended until 2006. Its principal investigator was Dr. Carol Stocker of NASA Ames Research Center. This project was funded by NASA within NASA’s ASTEP program for the development of technology for future space missions. This project was developed with the collaboration of several institutions in the United States and CAB. It consisted in the study of the subterranean environment of the zone of origin of the Tinto River (Huelva) where several perforations were made (160 m deeper) until reaching the anoxic zone isolated from the surface. The ultimate goal of the project was the design and development of an automatic platform for drilling without direct human intervention (automatic drilling) on ??the surface of Mars. This project was the beginning of research into the development of automatic drilling instruments for this purpose. It was developed in three phases: first and second year with non-automatic perforations and “in situ” study of the samples that were obtained in real time. In the third year, the automatic platform was implemented.

Jiasong Fang

Jiasong Fang is a professor in the College of Natural and Computational Sciences of Hawaii Pacific University, Distinguished Chair Professor in the College of Marine Sciences of Shanghai Ocean University, and Director of the Shanghai Engineering Research Center of Hadal Science and Technology. Dr. Fang received his Ph.D. in oceanography from Texas A&M University and did his postdoctoral training at the Department of Microbiology of Miami University.

His scientific interests are primarily in the areas of high-pressure microbiology and biogeochemistry, focusing on piezophilic microorganisms and their role in mediating biogeochemical cycles in the deep ocean and the deep biosphere. He has co-authored 100 scientific publications.

 

Anna Metaxas

Dr. Anna Metaxas is a Professor in Oceanography at Dalhousie University. She received a B.Sc. in Biology from McGill University in 1986, a MSc in Oceanography from the University of British Columbia in 1989 and a PhD from Dalhousie University in 1994. She was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institution from 1995 to 1997, and a Postdoctoral Scholar at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution from 1997 to 1999.

Her research focuses on the factors that regulate populations of benthic marine invertebrates, particularly early in their life history. She uses a combination of approaches, such as field sampling, laboratory experiments and mathematical modelling, to study organisms of ecological and economic importance, including invasive species. She has worked in a variety of habitats from shallow rocky subtidal regions to the deep-sea, including hydrothermal vents and deep- water corals, in temperate and tropical regions of the world. Her research has implications for marine conservation, such as the establishment and success of conservation areas for benthic populations.

Karen Olsson-Francis

Dr. Karen Olsson-Francis is a Senior Lecturer at the Open University, in the United Kingdom. Her research focuses on understanding the role that microorganisms play in biogeochemical cycling in extreme environments. She is interested in this from a diversity and functional prospective. In particular, she has focused on studying terrestrial analogue sites and utilizing this information to understand how, and where, potential evidence of life can be found elsewhere in the Solar System.

 

 

 

 

David Pearce

The underlying theme of David Pearce’s research is to use microbiology (and in particular novel molecular techniques applied to microbial ecology, microbial biodiversity and activity, environmental genomics, biogeochemical cycling and model extremophiles) to understand Polar ecosystem function and the potential for shifts in biogeochemical activity that may result from environmental change. He has taken the lead in the development of new frontiers of research in metagenomics, chemosynthetic communities, sediment sequestration of carbon and subglacial lake environments and have initiated new interdisciplinary approaches on the aerial environment (with chemists), ice nucleation activity (with physicists) and in the biogeochemistry of ice (with glaciologists).

Frank Reith

Frank Reith is an Associate Professor in geomicrobiology at the School of Biological Sciences at University of Adelaide and CSIRO Land and Water, where he heads the Microbes and Heavy Metal Research Group. He holds a PhD in Earth Sciences from the Australian National University. He is interested in microbial processes that affect metal cycling and the formation of new minerals. In turn, he also studies how microbes are affected by elevated concentrations of heavy metals in extreme environments. His particular interests lie in the biomediated cycling of noble/heavy metals, e.g., gold, silver, platinum, uranium, osmium and iridium.

An important aim of the fundamental processes understanding created by his research is to use it to develop tools for industry, e.g., biosensors and bioindicators for mineral exploration, as well as biotechnological methods for mineral processing and resource recovery from electronic waste. Thereby, his approach is highly multidisciplinary and covers field expeditions to remote corners of the Earth, synchrotron research, meta-genomic and proteomic approaches as well as statistical-, geochemical- and reactive transport modelling.

We were very saddened to hear of Frank’s passing before this Collection published. We are immensely grateful for his contributions to PLOS and to his field of research, as well as for his enthusiasm and kindness. Our thoughts go out to his family and friends.

Henrik Sass

Dr. Henrik Sass is senior lecturer in Geomicrobiology at the School of Earth and Ocean Sciences of Cardiff University. He received his PhD from the University of Oldenburg (Germany).

Henrik is a biogeochemist, geomicrobiologist and microbial physiologist with a special interest in anaerobic processes and the prokaryotes involved, such as the strictly anaerobic sulphate reducers and methanogens. He has been working on anaerobic metabolism and described new metabolic pathways in methanogens. One main topic of his research is life in the extreme environments, particularly life in the deep biosphere and in deep-sea anoxic brine lakes. These studies aim to reveal how anaerobes adapt to their particular ecological niches (e.g. oxygen tolerance of sulphate reducers). His work utilizes a range of different approaches including in situ activity measurements and the estimation of viable population sizes, but also culture-based laboratory experiments. Another aspect of his work has been the use of biomarkers, including dipicolinic acid for the detection of endospores in environmental samples.

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PLOS ONE at AGU 2013

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PLOS ONE is excited to participate in the American Geophysical Union’s (AGU) Fall Meeting 2013, held this week in San Francisco’s Moscone Center. Conveniently, Moscone is just down the street from our San Francisco office, so several members of PLOS staff will be in attendance and available to chat with you about the journal. We’re looking forward to meeting both current and potential Academic Editors, reviewers, and of course authors! Please stop by Booth #301 to say hello.

Last week was a very geophysics-oriented one for us, with both the publication of Hansen et al.’s work “Assessing “Dangerous Climate Change”: Required Reduction of Carbon Emissions to Protect Young People, Future Generations and Nature” and with the announcement of our call for papers in a new collection entitled “Responding to Climate Change.” What’s more exciting is that James Hansen will be in attendance at AGU and will be giving a talk today (December 10th) on this topic, in support of taking significant, active measures to reduce fossil fuel emissions.

Last year, at AGU 2012, we were a little bit of an unfamiliar face to many. This year, we hope to continue our conversation with the physical sciences community about our commitment to open access and the publication of sound scientific research in all areas of science and medicine, including geoscience, space science, chemistry, and physics.

After AGU, look out for the PLOS booth again in just a few days at the American Society for Cell Biology!

Image Credit: Detailed view of Arctic Sea Ice in 2007, from NASA Visible Earth.