Basic Research on Evolution, Physiology and Biomineralization of Marine Protists

Rutgers University is the largest institution for higher education in the state of New Jersey. The eighth-oldest college established in the United States, Rutgers was originally chartered as Queen's College in 1766. The Environmental Biophysics and Molecular Ecology (EBME) Laboratory at Rutgers is an interdisciplinary, multi-user research facility designed to explore the application of biophysical and molecular biological techniques to a wide number of environmental processes in both aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems. The EBME program bridges physical and biological sciences in the context of understanding how biological systems function and evolve in the environment.

The Falkowski Lab at Rutgers University has a long standing interest in the nascent field of metagenomics of marine eukaryotic phytoplankton. The research group seeks to understand the evolution of the protein templates that facilitate the precipitation of organized biosilicates and carbonates to form the "shells" of diatoms, coccolithophorids and other armored organisms. The lab uses suppressive subtraction hybridization libraries and SAGE technologies to identify the genes responsible for biomineralisation, transformation and RNAi techniques to examine the specific role of genes in the pathways and how modification of the pathways alter structural components. The research is supported by Rutgers University through the Center for Marine Biotechnology, and by the National Science Foundation and the National Atmospheric and Space Administration.