Project: US GEOTRACES PMT: Cobalt Biogeochemical Cycling and Connections to Metalloenzymes in the Pacific Ocean

NSF abstract:

Cobalt is important for many forms of marine life, yet it is one of the scarcest nutrients in the sea. Cobalt's oceanic abundance and distribution, along with other scarce nutrients, can influence the growth of microscopic plants (phytoplankton). This in turn can influence carbon cycles in the ocean and atmosphere. Therefore, knowledge of the controls on cobalt's abundance and chemical forms in seawater is a valuable component of our ability to understand the ocean's influence on global carbon cycling. Within phytoplankton and other marine microbes, metals such as cobalt, iron, nickel, and copper are used as critical components of enzymes responsible for key cellular reactions. Since these enzymes require metals to work, they are named metalloenzymes. Participating in a Pacific Ocean cruise from Alaska to Tahiti, this project will study the oceanic distributions of dissolved cobalt and the cellular content of a group of metalloenzymes known to influence biogeochemical cycles. The project will provide scientific impact by creating new knowledge about oceanic micronutrients in regions of economic interest with regard to fisheries and deep-sea mining. Measurement of proteins in the North Pacific will provide data of broad biological and chemical interest and will be made available through a new NSF-funded "EarthCube Ocean Protein Portal" data base. Educational impact will stem from participation of a graduate student and two young technicians, as well as the PI's development of a high school chemistry curriculum for use in two local high schools, thus allowing teachers to include real oceanic and environmental data at their first introduction to chemistry.

Cobalt has a complex biogeochemical cycle. Both its inorganic and organic forms are used by biology in the upper ocean and it is removed from solution by being scavenged in the intermediate and deep ocean. This scavenging removal results in cobalt having the smallest oceanic inventory of any biologically utilized element. Recent studies, however, have found that large dissolved cobalt plumes occur in major oxygen minimum zones due to a combination of less scavenging and additions from sedimentary and remineralization fluxes. The GP15 US GEOTRACES Pacific Meridional Transect (PMT) provides an opportunity to examine the influence of oxygen depletion on cobalt chemistry. Moreover, the study of the protein component of microbial communities using new proteomic techniques will provide evidence of how different major microorganisms respond to the chemical environment (e.g. through transporter production for specific nutrients and micronutrients) as well as the biochemical basis for metal requirements related to the use of specific metalloenzymes. Specifically, the PMT provides an opportunity to confirm that the Pacific oxygen minimum zones contain a large amount of cobalt and to test the hypotheses that simultaneous zinc scarcity could induce wide-scale biochemical substitution of cobalt for zinc in the North Pacific Ocean.