Federal Funding to Bolster GMGI Research Programs
November 2024
Recent funding from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) in support of GMGI’s research, will have a deep impact on the work taking place in our labs on Gloucester’s waterfront.
Supporting the Fisheries Program
Understanding population structure is critical for effective fisheries stock assessment and management. With new funding from NOAA, GMGI’s fisheries team led by Tim O’Donnell will be conducting research to better understand the genomic population structure of lobster and Atlantic herring in two separate projects.
The lobster fishery is the most valuable in the U.S. and has shown a history of inconsistent stock definition and climate change impacts. New funding from the NOAA Sea Grant American Lobster Research Program will generate high-quality genomic population structure information to reveal how lobsters are adapting to climate change and will contribute to the sustainable management of this highly prized fishery.
In the U.S., the Atlantic herring quota for commercial fishing is divided among four areas based on individual spawning populations to prevent overfishing. The distribution of this quota between these four areas is based on coarse estimates of spawning populations from the 1990s and educated guesses of seasonal mixing rates between population groups. With funding from the NOAA Saltonstall-Kennedy grant program GMGI’s fisheries team will use genomic sequencing to develop a tool that can reliably discriminate between the sub-populations and allow fishery managers to set area-specific quotas that prevent unsustainable levels of fishing on each spawning component.
Funding Sea Urchin Research
GMGI’s groundbreaking work using sea urchins as models for healthy aging and resistance to cancer will be advanced through new funding from the National Science Foundation’s EDGE grant program (Enabling Discovery through Genomics). This $2.9 million NSF EDGE grant is a collaboration between Andrea Bodnar’s group at GMGI, and researchers at Brown University, Duke University, University of Alabama, and the University of Washington to develop the next generation of molecular and cellular tools that will transform the ability to use sea urchins as research models.
For more than a century, sea urchins have served as valuable models for biomedical research that have led to important discoveries related to developmental biology and cancer research, including the Nobel Prize winning work of Otto Warburg (1931) and Tim Hunt (2001). The NSF EDGE funding will support the development of a new suite of functional genomic tools for sea urchins to advance basic and biomedical research across a myriad of applications. These tools promise to add a new era of discovery to the remarkable history of the sea urchin and will accelerate GMGI’s efforts to uncover mechanisms by which some species of sea urchins can attain lifespans of over 200 years without functional decline or increased incidence of disease, including no reported cases of cancer. Given the close genetic relationship between sea urchins and humans, our goal is to translate findings to preventative or therapeutic strategies for human age-related degenerative diseases and cancer.