Dr. Sergey Nuzhdin
Professor, USC, Molecular & Computational Biology
Lab Website

Kelp genomes, seedbanks, breeding programs, restoration, and farming

Tuesday, February 11
11:30 AM
AHF 153 (Torrey Webb Room)

Abstract: In recent decades, farmed kelp has gained traction as a highly attractive commodity, praised for its versatility and sustainability. Kelp ecosystem services are immense and include potential to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions via carbon sequestration; quality biomass to replace fossil fuels as feedstock for biofuels and bioplastics; a healthy and nutritious protein source to fight hunger; stabilizing soil erosion via biostimulation of microbial and plant communities; and improving the health of nearshore waters via sequestering access nutrients. Despite a growing demand across a broad cross-section of public and private sectors, investment opportunities remain hindered from a lack of foundational research, critical to understanding the integrative biology of kelp. Kelp science is completely fascinating for a variety of reasons, among them is the fact that many kelp genome attributes have been strongly clustered with plants under principal component analysis, including plant-like methylation mechanisms. How is this possible given 1.2BY of independent evolution of plant and kelp lineages? One hypothesis is that when kelp ancestors acquired chloroplasts, their genomes underwent horizontal transfer of planta-originated genome-located genes, then allowing them to function efficiently in a foreign genome. Kelps also display fascinating developmental parallels with plants including stem cell patterning, organ and tissue regeneration, and positional fate determination; however, they lack recognizable genetic players in these processes indicating a strong convergent evolution – a prime science problem for cell, development and evolutionary biologists to jointly attack. Kelps also respond to many common plant hormones. However, kelp genomes don’t encode corresponding biosynthetic pathways, and a likely source is an associated microbial community. What community ecology theory could explain such a reliance on interspecific signaling to guide the focal organism developmental decisions? How are metabolic functions distributed between kelp and associated microbes? Answering these questions will require close collaborations of community ecologists, computational biologists, and kelp physiologists.