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Assistant Professor of Biology Jamie Becker, Ph.D., in November published a research article on a minuscule yet mighty marine organism.

“” appeared in the scientific journal mBio.

Leading a team of 15 authors on the paper, Becker said it was a long time coming. Its roots go back to the mid-'80s, when senior author Penny Chisholm was credited with discovering the marine organism Prochlorococcus. Called "Pro" for short, this microbe is the most abundant photoautotroph – an organism that uses light energy to produce organic compounds – on Earth.

“It was so small it hadn’t been detected before,” Becker said. “As far as we know, it’s the simplest cell that's capable of doing photosynthesis. It takes in carbon dioxide and uses sunlight energy to create oxygen and sugars in the process. So they form the bottom of a lot of marine food webs and food chains. Slightly bigger cells consume them, and eventually all the way up to fish and whales.”

Before Becker arrived at Alvernia in the summer of 2020, he was a postdoctoral associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Chisholm is the principal investigator in the marine microbiology lab where he worked. The research that spurred the paper occurred at MIT, and Becker has continued to collaborate with the team there in the ensuing years.

“I was going out on field expeditions to the open ocean,” he said. “We knew from sampling seawater that there are types of Prochlorococcus that we don't have growing in any lab. When you can grow an organism in a laboratory, it opens the door to many different studies. You can sequence its entire genome, so you know exactly what genes it has. The cool thing about this paper is we were successful in isolating new strains of Prochlorococcus that no one had ever grown in the laboratory before. Then, we did a bunch of studies on them. We looked at how they grew under different light and temperature conditions and learned a lot about their physiology. And because we have their genetic information, it helps us better understand the evolution of this important marine microbe.”

Becker has always enjoyed culturing, or growing bacteria in the lab, despite the process being laborious and often difficult. "It takes perseverance," he said, comparing it to the methodical activity of gardening.

Also laborious and methodical was the writing process, which took about two years. Peer review then tacked on additional months.

“There are pros and cons to having so many co-authors,” he said. “You've got a lot of brains in the building and a lot of perspectives, but it extends the writing process because everybody's making contributions. The published piece is version 48 or something like that.”

Becker, who has co-authored over 20 papers in his career, including , hopes the Prochlorococcus article reinforces the importance of continuing to research and isolate new organisms, which could spur grant funding.

Though he hasn’t been on an ocean trip since moving to Alvernia, to capture and sequence environmental DNA, which is DNA sampled from the environment rather than directly from a living organism. He and his collaborator will return next summer, and a grant they recently received will allow Becker to bring along at least one Alvernia student for hands-on experiential learning and worldview expansion.

“I always tell my students that traveling is the No. 1 tangible way we can try to fight against a lot of the confusion, negativity and fear the world is experiencing right now,” he said. “Just learning that the way that I grew up doing things, the food that I grew up eating, the traditions that my family has is one way to do things. But it's not the only way to do things. And one's not right and one’s not wrong, they’re just different. And there's a lot of beauty and magic in that diversity. Bringing students along for those experiences is probably my favorite aspect of my job.”