MIT Darwin Project

The Darwin Project is an initiative to advance the development and application of novel models of marine microbes and microbial communities, identifying the relationships of individuals and communities to their environment, connecting cellular-scale processes to global microbial community structure.

We first explore a representation of marine microbial communities in which an ocean circulation model is seeded with a complex and diverse population of photo-autotrophs whos functional characteristics are attributed stocastically. The ecosystem self-organizes according to the relative fitness of the initialized cell types. A plausible phytoplankton biogeography emerges.

The MIT Darwin Project is a collaboration between affiliates of the Earth System Initiative (ESI) and the Computational and Systems Biology Initiative (CSBi). It is a new model for cross-disciplinary research at MIT, connecting systems biology, microbial ecology, global biogeochemical cycles and climate.

The program is important because it will help researchers understand and simulate the relationships between climate change, marine ecosystems and the ocean carbon cycle.

Principal investigator Michael Follows, a principal research scientist in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, was inspired to develop this approach after hearing Professor Penny Chisholm present her genomic studies of phytoplankton at an ESI retreat. Chisholm is the Lee and Geraldine Martin Professor of Environmental Studies in the Departments of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Biology.

Chisholm's group monitors the abundance and variations of the phytoplankton prochlorococcus in the worlds' oceans. Her team has identified fine-scale genetic variants at the sub-species level that also have distinct oceanic distributions and physiological attributes.

Modeling the regulation of global elemental cycles by marine microbial communities requires a detailed understanding of the physical and chemical environment, the molecular and cellular scale processes that dictate the response of an individual cell to that environment, and the organization of communities of organisms within that environment.

In addition to Follows and Tidor, the Darwin Project team also includes marine microbiologist Ed Delong from the Biological Engineering Division and the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and oceanographers John Marshall, Chris Hill and Stephanie Dutkiewicz from the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences.

The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation gift will fund new postdoctoral scientists and graduate students to help develop the models of microbes in the world's oceans. It will also fund new computing infrastructure to support these activities, including a new parallel processing computational cluster, a massive data storage system, a room-sized data visualization facility and a connection for MIT to the National Lambda Rail, a nationwide high-speed fiber optic data network.