Center for Chemical Currencies of a Microbial Planet (C-CoMP)
We are a NSF Science and Technology Center that explores how metabolite exchange through microbial networks impacts carbon cycling in the surface ocean
- If you're at #AGU25 stop by presentations from my lab! @microbialplanet.bsky.social bridge to PhD fellow @yunqianhu.bsky.social (also w/ @akrinos.bsky.social) will be presenting a poster Wednesday "OS33B-1119: Microbial Assemblages in the Context of Basin-Scale Variability Across the North Atlantic"
- 🌊🦠#FieldworkFriday Team work makes the dream work! We asked our cruise team and they agree - team work is essential for troubleshooting and creating a positive environment for all on board 🚢, laying the groundwork for forging lasting connections that last beyond the cruise! 🧪
- Scientists from @microbialplanet.bsky.social 🌊 hosted a important panel at COP30 Ocean Pavilion Advocating for the Invisible Microbial Majority That Underpins a Healthy Planet Panel ccomp-stc.org/microbes-at-...
- 📣 Special thanks to our moderator and panelists for representing microbes 🦠 in the #oceanpavilion @cop30brazil.bsky.social in the only microbial panel at #cop30. Microbes play key roles in climate. They need to be considered in navigating what happens next for our planet 🌎!
- Ready to learn about how microbes 🦠 are stakeholders and players in what happens next for our planet 🌎? If you are @cop30brazil.bsky.social #COP30, please attend our panel from 1:30 - 2:30 today (Nov. 19) in the #OceanPavilion. Details in the flyer! @whoi.edu @climate.columbia.edu 🧪
- Ready to learn about how microbes 🦠 are stakeholders and players in what happens next for our planet 🌎? If you are @cop30brazil.bsky.social #COP30, please attend our panel from 1:30 - 2:30 today (Nov. 19) in the #OceanPavilion. Details in the flyer! @whoi.edu @climate.columbia.edu 🧪
- Special thanks to Elizabeth Kujawinski @whoi.edu, Sonya Dyhrman @climate.columbia.edu, Pearl Mitchell @deakinuniversity.bsky.social, Marcia Macedo @columbiauniversity.bsky.social @woodwellclimate.bsky.social, & @marirs.bsky.social @universityofhawaii.bsky.social @icrs.bsky.social for participating!
- Are you @cop30brazil.bsky.social #COP30 and interested in learning more about microbes 🦠 and how they impact our planet 🌎? Don't miss the panel hosted by our Director Elizabeth Kujawinski and Sonya Dyhrman @climate.columbia.edu tomorrow (Nov. 19) starting at 1:30 pm in the #OceanPavilion! 🧪
- 📣 Microbes 🦠 are a key player & stakeholder in what happens next for our planet 🌎. C-CoMP will host a panel this week at #COP30 in the #OceanPavilion to discuss how to include the invisible microbial majority in a sustainable future. ccomp-stc.org/microbes-at-... @whoi.edu @cop30brazil.bsky.social
- 📣 Microbes 🦠 are a key player & stakeholder in what happens next for our planet 🌎. C-CoMP will host a panel this week at #COP30 in the #OceanPavilion to discuss how to include the invisible microbial majority in a sustainable future. ccomp-stc.org/microbes-at-... @whoi.edu @cop30brazil.bsky.social
- 🌊🦠#FieldworkFriday Interested in learning more about the people, samples, and research activities that were conducted on the C-CoMP March 2025 cruise (@biosstation.bsky.social ➡️ @whoi.edu)? Well if you are, you are in luck! Check out our AE2504 cruise report: zenodo.org/records/1675... 🧪
- 📣 C-CoMP Pub Alert! Check out this new paper that investigates how bacteria control heterotrophic respiration and net community production in the Sargasso Sea 🌊. Congrats to the authors 🎉! 🧪
- New 🌊 paper on "Bacterial Control of Metabolic Balance in the Sargasso Sea Near Bermuda: Insights From Data-Assimilative Biogeochemical Modeling" by Kim, Mao, Archibald, Terhaar, and Thomason @whoi.edu @jgrbiogeo.bsky.social agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....
- 📣New preprint alert! Check out this new preprint by Zhu et al. that quantifies and compares labile exometabolites from six axenic strains of marine phytoplankton 🌊 to identify key chemical currencies within the marine chemical-microbial network! 🧪🦠
- Super excited to be part of this beautiful effort led by @zhuyt0515.bsky.social and Hanna Anderson! A true team effort to characterize diversity in phytoplankton-excreted metabolites and identify key chemical currencies within the ocean ecosystem and carbon cycle www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
- 📣#MTTM Dr. Henry Holm is a postdoc researcher working with C-CoMP and the Dyhrman and Hurley lab groups @columbiauniversity.bsky.social @lamont.columbia.edu. He is a chemical 🧪oceanographer by training and thinks a lot about how phytoplankton move carbon through the ocean 🌊.
- Henry's PhD research investigated how marine phytoplankton adapt their lipid membranes to a range of environmental conditions. Now he studies how phytoplankton may cycle carbon differently in future oceans that are hotter & more acidic using culturing and 'omics methods.
- 🌊🦠#FieldworkFriday! C-CoMP focuses on microbes & chemicals, so it is easy for us to forget how vast our ocean is 🌊. Being at sea 🚢 is the loveliest reminder - there’s nothing as wondrous or humbling as floating in endless cerulean blue while receiving rare visits from animals🐦!
- Congrats @maratimes.bsky.social!
- Meet the 2025 Catalyst Research Awardees! IBES will fund 6 core & affiliate faculty members to pursue scholarly projects around the world, with topics ranging from parasite identification to Indigenous-led environmental justice organizing. Mara Freilich Brown History Department Brown Biostatistics
- 📣#MTTM Annika Gomez is a @simonsfoundation.org Postdoc Fellow in Marine Microbial Ecology in the Dyhrman Group @columbiauniversity.bsky.social. She studies marine viruses that exert a major influence on the fate of organic carbon in phytoplankton 🌊using ‘omics and culturing methods.
- The conditions that lead to successful infection of phytoplankton in the wild are poorly understood. Annika seeks to unravel the role of nutrient stress in determining susceptibility to viral infection and apply this knowledge to isolate novel phytoplankton-virus pairs.
- Had a fabulous time meeting with C-CoMP members last week at our Annual Meeting in Woods Hole. Thanks for all the great discussions 🧪🌊🦠💻🚢🌎! We are looking forward to an exciting year of investigating bioreactive molecules within the marine chemical-microbial network!
- Wrapping up a great week of science with some light LEGO dehydration synthesis! @microbialplanet.bsky.social @fuuchan20.bsky.social @maksaito.bsky.social
- 🌊🦠#FieldworkFriday! Once seawater lands on deck, it’s go time 🏁! Researchers frequently spend hours in the lab each day and night (!) filtering and processing samples and running incubations. Here are a few snapshots from lab work during the C-CoMP 2025 March Cruise, AE2504!
- And more photos:
- 📣#MTTM Mariana Torres (martorres.bsky.social) is a C-CoMP B2P Fellow working with @rogierbraakman.bsky.social @mit.edu. Using computational methods, they are investigating environmental drivers of carbon cycle metabolism dynamics in the North Atlantic Ocean 🌊.
- Alongside this work, they collaborate with their C-CoMP B2P cohort to study how ocean extremes (#marineheatwaves 🌡️), impact phytoplankton ecosystem dynamics through satellite observations 🦠🛰️.
- Mariana is motivated to explore questions at the intersection of physics, biogeochemistry, and biology, to understand how these processes interact + what role they play in the global state of the ocean. They are excited to apply to doctoral programs in oceanography this fall!
- 🌊🦠#FieldworkFriday! And that’s a wrap 🎬on C-CoMP Cruise 2 🚢! We (C-CoMP + AE) accomplished an impressive feat - 95 CTD casts, 110,778 L of sw filtered with @clio-thebgcauv.bsky.social, eddy sampling, & 9 exp types across 3 locations - to characterize marine chemical currencies & microbes!
- A big thank you to all the folks at @biosstation.bsky.social, @whoi.edu, and the crew and Captain of the R/V Atlantic Explorer for making this research and cruise possible!
- 📣#MTTM Jill Paquette is a C-CoMP B2P fellow working in the Dyhrman Lab @lamont.columbia.edu @columbiauniversity.bsky.social. She uses computational approaches and lab culturing methods to investigate how nutrient stress affects the gene expression of eukaryotic phytoplankton 🌊🦠.
- Jill is interested in marine biology & oceanography 🌊. Her interest in expanding her knowledge of ocean systems and biogeochem before applying to graduate PhD programs led her to join C-CoMP. Jill is excited for her second year in the program and to apply to graduate programs!
- 🌊🦠#FieldworkFriday! During our March cruise, C-CoMP researchers deployed SVP drifters during diel sampling. The drifters enabled tracking/sampling the same parcel of water in a Lagrangian approach, aiding efforts to capture diel microbial signals from the same water over time!
- Successful dive and recovery to the eddy center, 18 sample depths down to 800 meters deep and engineering tests completed too.
- Hey - check it out! @clio-thebgcauv.bsky.social is exploring an eddy during the second C-CoMP cruise! We are excited to see how the eddy impacts microbial and metabolite dynamics. Stay tuned!
- We're out at sea with C-COMP @microbialplanet.bsky.social and the AUV Clio. Clio's social media account has migrated from the other place to the blue place @clio-thebgcauv.bsky.social , follow for mild sarcastic pseudo-first robot humor updates...
- Currently I'm at sea supporting C-COMP's chemical currencies research in the North Atlantic Ocean. (@microbialplanet.bsky.social).
- 🌊🦠#FieldworkFriday! During the C-CoMP March Cruise, Clio, the biogeochemistry AUV, was used to collect particle samples for proteomics and metagenomics from various depths within the water column. Check out some of these photos of Clio in action:
- Check-out this new paper on vitamin auxotrophies by @rachelgregor.bsky.social, a former C-CoMP Postdoc, and colleagues. Great job team! 🧪
- 🌊🦠🧪 Delighted to share this work now out in @isme-microbes.bsky.social: doi.org/10.1093/isme... The currency of microbial life is chemistry, but there’s so much still unknown about how metabolic interactions shape communities. 1/
- C-CoMP participated in the 2025 Woods Hole Science Stroll! Our booth, called the “Artistic Oceanographer”, invited visitors to explore & imagine incredible adaptations of marine phytoplankton. Thanks to our volunteers & the Dyhrman Lab @lamont.columbia.edu for creating this activity!
- 🌊🦠#FieldworkFriday Our fieldwork doesn't only happen at sea! C-CoMP researchers working with @maratimes.bsky.social collected Providence River water to test extraction methods for samples collected on C-CoMP cruises. In terms of filtering speed, 5 L of Sargasso sw = 50 mL of Providence River water!
- 📣#MTTM 🔬Emily Hu (@yunqianhu.bsky.social) is a C-CoMP B2P Fellow working with @maratimes.bsky.social & @akrinos.bsky.social at Brown. She uses microbial sequence data and computational tools to uncover how biotic🦠& abiotic drivers shape microbial community assembly in the North Atlantic Ocean 🌊.
- Emily also explores how ocean mixing events impact microbes using samples from our latest research cruise! Her work sits at the intersection of biology & physical oceanography—understanding where microbes thrive, what they do, and how they respond to a rapidly changing ocean🌍.
- 🌊🦠#FieldworkFriday! On the 2025 C-CoMP March Cruise, Dr. Loay Jabre (loayjabre.bsky.social) brought a Planktoscope(an open-source and high-throughput plankton imaging platform) on board to track community shifts of plankton in real time from BATS to the LTER site!! Check it out:
- A video of a copepod (a zoop!):
- And more images here:
- 📣#MTTM Amanda Ellis is a C-CoMP B2P fellow working with Drs. Sarah Hurley & Sonya Dyhrman @lamont.columbia.edu. She studies the ability of marine phytoplankton 🌊 to acclimate + evolve to increasing temperature🌡️+ acidity by tracking changes to oxygen evolution + respiration rate.
- She is fascinated by the ability of marine organisms to adapt to changing environments and how this knowledge can be translated to mitigate the effects of a changing ocean 🌊🌎🦠.
- #ECRSpotlight PhD student Marie Delcy recently presented her C-CoMP research on how early career researchers #ECRs "job craft" to make their research training a better fit with their interests & aspirations at the 2025 @sabercommunity.bsky.social meeting. Marie works with @erindolan1.bsky.social.
- 🌊🦠#FieldworkFriday! It’s a carbon feast 🍽️ and microbes🦠are invited! During the March 2025 C-CoMP cruise, early career researchers incubated surface ocean microbial communities on novel carbon sources produced by phytoplankton to study carbon drawdown rate and post-uptake fate.
- 📣 New C-CoMP Pub. Alert! Interested in marine microbial metabolites 🌊🦠? If so, check out this new pub., led by Bryndan Durham & Winn Johnson, that emerged from C-CoMP's Labile DOM workshop: An ecological framework for microbial metabolites in the ocean ecosystem. tinyurl.com/54bu2xm7
- 📣#MTTM Daniella Asturias @daniellaasturias.bsky.social is a C-CoMP B2P fellow with @maksaito.bsky.social @whoi.edu. She investigates B12 mutualisms between bacteria & diatoms in Antarctic ecosystems❄️ by using proteomics & trace metal analysis to explore how these interactions shape nutrient cycling.
- Daniella is fascinated by how microbes🦠adapt & respond to environmental change, especially in extreme ecosystems. She’s also interested in remote sensing approaches and is working with PACE satellite data 🛰️ to study shifts in phytoplankton community composition.
- Daniella is excited to uncover how tiny organisms sustain life at the edges of the planet and what they can teach us about resilience in a changing world 🌎.
