Announcements & “In the News”

C-MORE featured on Science Buzz

The Center is featured in a recent blog entry at Science Buzz. This is part of a partnership between C-MORE and the Science Museum of Minnesota.

Big ocean, small RNAs
in Nature

In recent article in the journal Nature, C-MORE co-PI Ed DeLong (at MIT), his graduate student Yanmei Shi, and postdoc Gene Tyson have discovered that around 30% of all RNA transcripts in the North Pacific Ocean code for short, untranslated transcripts that match to the regions between genes in microbial genomes.

Red glow traces ocean plant health

C-MORE team member Scott Doney (at WHOI) published in the journal Biogeosciences about how fluorescent red light emitted by ocean phytoplankton and detected by the satellite “Aqua” reveals how efficiently the microscopic plants are turning sunlight and nutrients into food through photosynthesis.

Read more about it in the NASA press release. (Image courtesy Maria Vernet, Scripps Institution of Oceanography.)

Phylogenetics Workshop featuring intro to ARB

C-MORE is offering hands-on workshops at UH and WHOI to provide participants with the skills necessary to perform phylogenetic analyses on nucleotide sequences from microorganisms.

For details and to application forms, please visit our grad student and post-doc opportunities page.

Previous announcements are available on the Archived News and Announcements page.

Welcome to C-MORE

C-MORE Hale Groundbreaking: 15 April 2009

On Wednesday 15 April 2009, ground was broken at UH Mānoa for a $22 million building to house C-MORE labs and offices. It will be one of 17 National Science Foundation centers of science and technology nationwide, and the only one in Hawai‘i. US Sen. Daniel Inouye noted that when he started his college career, ambitious students wanted to go elsewhere to get a top educational experience. “When I got into this business, I said to myself, ‘We’re going to change that‘,” he said, “And this is a demonstration of that change. Now … this is the place to look into oceanography. This is the place where the experts reside.”

Thank you to the participants and attendees of the groundbreaking ceremony, with special thanks to University of Hawai‘i President David McClain, UH Mānoa Chancellor Virginia Hinshaw, US Senator Daniel Inouye (above), C-MORE Director Dave Karl, NSF-OIA head Lance Haworth, and Kahu Kordell Kekoa! Read more about in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin. (Photo courtesy of Sam Wilson; click on it to see the full image.)

To view a video of the ceremony, click on the image above of Sen. Inouye, or click here (requires RealPlayer; the video make take a few moments to download, depending on your connection). This video was directed and produced by Eric Grabowski.

About the Center

Rendering of C-MORE Hale. The Center for Microbial Oceanography: Research and Education (C-MORE) was established in August 2006 as a National Science Foundation (NSF) sponsored Science and Technology Center. The center is designed to facilitate a more comprehensive understanding of the biological and ecological diversity of marine micro-organisms.

Life has its origins in the sea: the first living things were microbes. Marine microbes are the most abundant life forms on Earth, and everything about them is extraordinarily diverse: their structures, their genomes, their physiologies, and their ecological interactions with each other and with the rest of life on the planet.

As a global research information center working across disciplines, C-MORE brings together teams of experts—scientists, educators, and community members—who usually have little opportunity to interact, facilitating the creation and dissemination of a new understanding of the critically important role of marine microbes in global habitability.

The center’s mission and unifying vision is expressed it the motto: Linking Genomes to Biomes.

The Center’s activities are shared among five partner institutions:

and is coordinated at the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa.