MRI-R2 Consortium: Acquisition of multiple Environmental Sample Processors (ESPs) and supporting mooring and communications hardware

Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Woods Hole MA

Investigators

Abstract

"This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5)." The PI?s request funds to acquire five Environmental Sample Processors (ESPs) and supporting mooring and communications hardware to further their research activities and foster collaborations. The ESP?s will be deployed together in an array configuration to obtain real-time data on a wide range of microorganisms and their metabolites. For many years, this has been a distant dream, but that dream is now close to reality with the development and commercialization of the Environmental Sample Processor (ESP) that is the centerpiece of this proposal. The ESP can be deployed subsurface for months at a time. It collects and processes water samples, identifies and enumerates harmful algal bloom (HAB) species, pathogens, and other microorganisms as well as the concentration of specific metabolites such as algal toxins, and relays the data to shore. To foster greater flexibility, the ESP has been designed with a microfluidic block which allows analytical modules of different types (e.g., quantitative PCR) to be placed downstream of the water processing core. A wide variety of organisms and chemicals of interest to science and society can be analyzed over time scales that are not otherwise possible, all in automated fashion. Broader Impacts The potential broader impacts include: educational and outreach benefits from numerous undergraduates, graduate students, post docs, technical staff, and senior faculty working with the ESPs through various projects; various summer internship programs provided by WHOI and Biosecurity, Inc. for undergraduates including minority students; Monterey Bay Aquarium has included the ESP in a program that runs twice a day reaching almost 300,000 people a year; Volunteer phytoplankton researchers from 11 different states will be exposed to the ESP at various training workshops; scientifically, the placement of more ESP's into the ocean and eventually onto mobile platforms will give us the potential to inform and drive adaptive sampling in the way that CTD measurements do now; testing and establishing ESP technology will not only further the proposed research but also contribute to commercial interests that manufacture and sell advanced scientific instrumentation. As the technology is proven, other research groups will seek to incorporate it, and demand for the same or similar instruments will grow; many of the enabled/enhanced projects (research and educational) supported by this proposal are multi-investigator, and even multi-institutional, in nature and would further increase networking and partnering among relevant research groups.