Bob Jamieson dot Net » Biomarkers

#AGU Poster Session

Bob — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 13:24:34 +0000

AGU attendees! Just a quick note to encourage you to check out the poster session on the morning of Friday the 18th. Among others there will also be the poster which is the culmination of my project over the summer and my first piece of ‘proper’ published work. Details are below (cribbed shamelessly from the AGU website):

ID#	GC51A-0714
Location:	Poster Hall (Moscone South)
Time of Presentation:	Dec 18 8:00 AM – 12:20 PM

Stable carbon isotopes of zooplankton lipid components as a tool to differentiate between pelagic and ice algae as a food source for zooplankton in the Arctic Ocean.
J. A. Bendle¹; H. Moossen¹; R. Jamieson¹; A. Wold²; S. Falk-Peterson²
1. G.E.S., University of Glasgow, Glasgow, United Kingdom.
2. Norwegian Polar Institute , Tromsø, Norway.

Every summer in the Arctic, the ice cover melts and releases sea-ice algae into the surrounding waters. How important are these algae, consisting mostly of diatoms, as a major food source for zooplankton and higher trophic levels? The answer to this question is timely, given predictions for the loss of summer sea ice cover this century. We are investigating the use of compound specific carbon isotopes as a tool to differentiate between lipids found in zooplankton which feed on diatoms living in the open ocean and zooplankton which feed on diatoms derived from the ice. To this effect we analyse the carbon isotopic signature of the major fatty acids and alcohols and that of the major sterols collected during the Arctic ICE CHASER expedition aboard the RRV James Clark Ross in 2008. Twenty three zooplankton samples comprised of 11 different species were collected in four different depth intervals at three different sites around Svalbard. The sites had variable ice cover, from open water to solid ice. We analysed the lipid composition of the zooplankton samples with special emphasis on the fatty acids and fatty alcohols bound as esters. Esters are produced by zooplankton to function as an energy reservoir. Initial results such as the occurrence of Brassicasterol, 24 methylencholest 5 en-3β-ol and Desmosterol, high amounts of the C20:5ω3 fatty acid and high C16:1ω7/C16:0-fatty acid ratios suggest that diatoms are an important part of the zooplankton diet.

http://www.ges.gla.ac.uk:443/postgraduates/hmoossen

Be sure to tell the bewildered looking German PhD student standing next to it that Bob says hi. That should baffle Heiko entertainingly.

Life in the Lab: Week 1

Bob — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 22:07:34 +0000

I’ve spent the last week in the G-Mol Lab working on my summer project. The lab is great; brand new and with cutting edge analytical equipment.
So far I’ve spent the whole week preparing samples. Grinding up zooplankton, weighing them, extracting organic compounds (mostly lipids), evaporating the extract down, more weighing. It’s slow work, but I’m going faster now that I’ve got the method down. Next week I need to do the same for the last batch, and then we get to start dividing up the fractions, and running them through the GC-MS.

In the meantime, here are some pictures:

My Workspace in the Lab

My fume hood, work in progress samples and lab book. Also visible is one of the rotary evaporators.

Extracts

The extracts from the first 11 samples + blank (one of the samples isn’t shown) before drying them down to weigh the dry mass. The brilliant orange colours are an unusual sight in a geochemistry lab. The bright orange colours of samples 50 and 51 are from Calanus Hyperboreus.

It was a really good first week, I’ve learnt a lot and it has been pretty enjoyable. The next 6 weeks promise to be just as interesting, if not more so.

Summer Lab Project

Bob — Mon, 25 May 2009 22:55:04 +0000

A couple of months ago an e-mail was sent round to the second and third year students to see if anyone was interested in doing a 7-week lab project over the summer funded by Nuffield Science Bursaries. Since I enjoy practical chemistry (and we’d had precious little Chemistry so far in the Earth Science course) I decided to go for it. The tie-breaker question to decide who would get to apply for the bursary was “Why is Palaeoclimatology Important?”. We had to reply with a 200 word statement, here’s mine if anyone’s interested:

Palaeoclimatology is a field of particular importance presently, largely due to the extensive, and somewhat heated, discussions about climate change currently going on in many circles. Many arguments about anthropogenic climate change are founded (on both sides) on unreliable facts and anecdotes. For all the emotional impact of a lonely polar bear on a tiny, melting iceberg it gives us very little useful data about the extent and nature of climate change.
Therefore, the procurement of extensive, accurate data on past temperatures and atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations is the key to increasing our understanding of how humanity is affecting the earth system, compared to historical ‘natural’ variations. By acquiring a series of accurate, worldwide data we can assess the current changes and the ‘hockey-stick’ graph within the context of the planet’s geological history. Furthermore, we can assess the importance of other temperature variations such as the ‘Little Ice Age’ and the ‘Medieval Warm Period’, allowing a balanced, rational discussion based on hard evidence rather than emotive language and images. Palaeoclimatology also has applications related to other facets of Earth Sciences; accurate information about Earth’s palaeoclimate is important to fields as diverse as Palaeobiology, Glaciology and even Astrophysics (particularly the study of stellar evolution) – fields that are rather less encumbered by politics.

Myself and another student got picked (presumably by random chance, since I can’t imagine that statement was too impressive given I wrote it during a structure lecture) to apply for the bursaries. We recently heard back, and got the go ahead. I’m thrilled by the whole thing, and really looking forward to getting started in a couple of weeks.

For the project itself I’ll be working with Dr. Bendle and Heiko Moossen (one of the departments PhD students) analysing samples of Zooplankton collected from the Arctic by Dr. Bendle, looking at various biomarkers to gather information about their diets (what algae they eat) and examining whether these measurements can give us an indication of climate. This all feeds into Heiko’s PhD which is looking at Palaeoclimate proxies (such as biomarkers) in Arctic and Nordic shelf areas.

Most of which is well over my head at this point. I’m currently trying to get a bunch of reading done to wrap my head around the project as a whole, including an excellent book on biomarkers – Echoes of Life.

Of course, the other great part of this project is that I get to work in the newest lab in the University – the Glasgow Molecular Organic Geochemistry Lab in the deepest darkest basement of the Gregory Building. I start the project on the 22nd of June; no doubt you’ll hear more from me about this topic between now and then.