Prof. Sallie W Chisholm

No one knows more about Prochlorococcus than MIT biologist Chisholm, who has been the Lee and Geraldine Martin Professor in Environmental Studies at MIT since 2002. Indeed, she was a co-discoverer of Prochlorococcus in the 1980s, and has been heavily focused on it ever since, publishing a series of findings detailing how Prochlorococcus interacts with other creatures and influences the environment on a planetary scale -- work that seems increasingly significant at a time when climate change may be altering the world’s oceans.

The Chisholm Lab studies the role of the cyanobacterium Prochlorococcus in the ocean's "metabolism.” Work ranges from the genome to the open ocean, and includes laboratory and field studies, as well as modeling. The Lab is also interested in Prochlorococcus' interactions with viruses (cyanophages) and co-occurring marine heterotrophs.

One of the goals of the Chisholm Lab is to develop Prochlorococcus, and its phage, as a model system for Integrative Systems Biology. Advances in sequencing and high-throughput technologies have begun to generate massive databases of microbial genes and transcriptomes in the oceans, and we are fortunate that Prochlorococcus genes are well represented in these data bases. In addition, genomes of cultured isolates of Prochlorococcus, and the phage that infect them, are growing in number, as are microarray experiments to examine gene expression. The goal of this public website is to provide easy access to this growing database of Prochlor