2025 Research Review

At GMGI, we are committed to advancing our understanding of the oceans and inspiring new discoveries that benefit humankind. 2025 has been an exciting year for GMGI’s Research Team with great progress across all our research programs impacting fisheries, human health, and the environment. We are profoundly grateful for the generous support of our donors who have enabled this progress.

Below are project updates from our two divisions: Healthy Oceans & Fisheries and Marine Biomedical Discovery.

Jump to:

Ocean Biodiversity & Marine Protected Areas  |   Innovative Technologies for Detection of Harmful Algal Blooms  |  Impacts of Offshore Wind on Massachusetts Fisheries  |  Fish Epigenetic Aging  |  GMGI’s New eDNA Service  |  Sea Urchins as Models for Aging and Cancer Research  |  The Genomics of Exceptional Longevity  |  Other Highlights

Click here to download the 2025 Research Review.

Ocean Biodiversity & Marine Protected Areas

With funding from the Danaher Foundation, GMGI continued its work in Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary (SBNMS) using environmental DNA (eDNA) to document biodiversity across the entire sanctuary in every season. The goal is to understand the natural resilience that supports sustainable and healthy ocean ecosystems in a vital Marine Protected Area. Our team published their baseline eDNA assessment, revealing the full scope of genetic diversity in unprecedented detail, from bacteria to whales, across 40 sites in SBNMS. This multi-year assessment is a first step toward creating an atlas of life in New England waters. It also inspired an ambitious new initiative at GMGI — The Virtual Living Ocean — a multiscale, interactive computational platform to visualize, analyze, and model the organisms that inhabit the ocean. By making global ocean data as accessible as Google Maps is for land, the Virtual Living Ocean will transform conservation efforts, fisheries management, climate solutions, and democratize access to marine knowledge.

Innovative Technologies for Detection of Harmful Algal Blooms

Harmful Algal Blooms are increasing in frequency and intensity across the globe, causing widespread ecological disruption, economic losses, and risks to human and animal health. Supported by funding from NOAA’s Monitoring and Event Response Harmful Algal Bloom (MERHAB) program, GMGI researchers have been testing a rapid CRISPR-based diagnostic that they developed to detect Pseudo-nitzschia, a marine planktonic diatom that produces a potent neurotoxin that can accumulate in shellfish causing shellfish poisoning when ingested by humans and marine mammals. Working with collaborators in Florida and Maine, GMGI has demonstrated that the new diagnostic test can detect toxin-producing species as well as the genes responsible for toxin production. These tools will enable early warning systems for tracking and responding to Harmful Algal Blooms.

Impacts of Offshore Wind on Massachusetts Fisheries

GMGI researchers are part of a collaborative project, established in 2023 and funded by the State, with the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries and the New England Aquarium to investigate the impact of offshore wind on economically important fish species using acoustic telemetry and environmental DNA (eDNA). The co-existence of the offshore wind and fisheries industries is essential for the future of the Massachusetts blue economy. This project is part of a large-scale program that began in 2023 to provide a coordinated research effort to measure the potential impacts of offshore wind development and construction on fisheries and the marine ecosystem. Our eDNA analysis has detected significant community shifts in response to seasons and construction activities and is illuminating forage fish distribution patterns, a critical data gap that is likely driving predator movements documented using acoustic telemetry data.

Fish Epigenetic Aging

While estimates of fish age are essential for the sustainable management of fish stocks, accurately measuring age is challenging for some commercially important species. In collaboration with NOAA Fisheries, the GMGI’s Fisheries Team, supported by philanthropy, developed an accurate, sensitive, epigenetic clock method for predicting age in haddock (Melanogrammus aeglefinus), one of the most valuable commercial fisheries in the North Atlantic Ocean. Epigenetics refers to processes that alter DNA structure without changing the DNA sequence itself. The haddock epigenetic aging clock provides a sensitive, cost-effective, non-lethal alternative to counting annual growth rings of fish ear stones (otoliths), a lethal and labor-intensive method only possible with bony fishes. GMGI’s team is currently working to extend these results to generate a universal fish aging tool that would have the potential to impact global fish stocks.

GMGI’s New eDNA Service

Environmental DNA (eDNA), an area in which GMGI is a leader in New England, is transforming how we study and manage ecosystems, with applications that cut across regulatory, conservation, and resource management. To meet the growing demand for eDNA in fisheries assessments and ocean resilience research, GMGI hired Yuan Liu, Ph.D. from NOAA to launch a new revenue-generating eDNA Service, delivering robust, efficient, and scientifically rigorous solutions for collecting, processing, analyzing, and applying eDNA data. Our goal is to connect scientists, conservationists, and policymakers with the insights and analyses they need to monitor ecosystems at scale and catalyze new discoveries in ecology, evolution, and environmental science. The expansion of GMGI’s eDNA Service was enabled in part by grants from the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative and the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center.

Sea Urchins as Models for Aging and Cancer Research

GMGI’s research team is studying the remarkable biology of long-lived marine animals — such as sea urchin species that can live for over a century without showing signs of aging — to uncover mechanisms that promote healthy aging and protect against cancer. In 2025, our work focused on understanding how these animals maintain nervous system function with age and investigated cancer protection mechanisms by measuring the response of sea urchin cells to DNA damage. In work supported by the National Science Foundation, we established the first long-term, genetically tractable sea urchin cell lines — an unprecedented achievement for any marine invertebrate. These embryonic stem cell lines represent a powerful platform to investigate the function of specific genes and how they contribute to longevity. Because sea urchins share a close genetic relationship with humans, the discoveries we make through this work have the potential to inform new strategies to prevent or treat age-related diseases and cancer.

The Genomics of Exceptional Longevity

Aging is a universal challenge for life, yet different species do so at very different rates and timings. While most species lose critical functionality in weeks, months, or years, some species can resist cancer, heart disease, and maintain neuromuscular function for centuries. This year, GMGI welcomed a new Research Scientist, Stephen Treaster, Ph.D., whose research taps into the natural diversity of lifespans across species and populations to identify shared genomic signatures, produced by evolution, that regulate aging. This work includes generating and mining genomic data from exceptionally long-lived species such as the earth’s longest-lived animal the ocean quahog clam (Arctica islandica), lifespan more than 500 years and the rougheye rockfish (Sebastes aleutianus), lifespan more than 200 years. Shared evolutionary signatures underlying lifespan shifts uncovered by this approach will be tested and modeled in zebrafish to identify molecular mechanisms that will extend healthspan, ultimately to inform treatments to delay age-related diseases in people.

Other Highlights