The DNA of the Polar Seas

The DNA of the Polar Seas

Associate professor Nikolaj Blom, Cand. Scient. (M.Sc.), Ph.d., Center for Biological Sequence Analysis, The Technical University of Denmark

Less than one per cent of all existing microorganisms have been cultivated and analysed to establish their properties. The remaining 99 per cent have either not yet been discovered or have proved impossible to cultivate in laboratories.

For 400 years, Denmark has sent out expeditions to widen our cultural, economic and, not least, our scientific horizons. Each time, the expeditions have brought back groundbreaking scientific knowledge that has strengthened the position of Danish natural science. Like its predecessors, Galathea 3 is to be at the vanguard of Danish fundamental research and contribute with new discoveries and awaken renewed interest within both classical and new areas of natural science. For instance, when the second Galathea expedition demonstrated the existence of living fish and other organisms in the deepest areas of the oceans, it helped opening the eyes of the World to life in the deepest sea.

The “DNA of the Polar Seas” project will add a new dimension to the Galathea 3 expedition, partly by going quite literally into depth, but also by delving into the smallest scale. We shall thus partly focus on the relatively unexplored microbiological diversity of the polar marine environments and partly demonstrate how new discoveries at the DNA level may be applied in practice. The research will be applying meta-genome analysis, which offers the advantage that it provides insight into the genome of not only the one per cent of microorganisms that can be cultivated, but also of the 99 per cent that cannot be cultivated or are yet to be discovered. Meta-genome analysis thus gives a kind of genetic fingerprint of a certain microbiological environment.

The “DNA of the Polar Seas” encompasses two components: a scientific, bio-informatics component and a communication and application component. The project consists of one of the leading European research groups within bioinformatics and one of the leading American centres of DNA sequencing.