Personal
Kay Bidle is an Assistant Professor at IMCS and studies marine microbes, like phytoplankton, bacteria and viruses. He came to Rutgers in 2001 from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, where he received his PhD in Marine Biology. Kay won the 2005 Raymond A. Lindeman Award, an international recognition given by the American Society of Limnology and Oceanography for the best scientific research paper by a young oceanographer.
Kay lives in Lawrenceville, NJ with his wife, Kelly, and his three blond boys. He enjoys spending time with his family---playing sports, visiting the NJ shore, biking, hiking and traveling. Kay is passionate about soccer, music, skateboarding, and surfing. On nice sunny days, you may see Kay commuting through New Brunswick on his long skateboard. He is actively involved in the Lawrence Hamnett Soccer Association, as a coach for both travel and recreation soccer teams and a member of the Board. Kay is also an active participant in Sustainable Lawrence, a non-profit organization of Lawrence Township residents dedicated to a sustainable community through alternative fuel, locally produced food, and environmentally-friendly practices. He currently serves on ‘The Solar Panel’,which is exploring ways with which Lawrence Township can implement community solar projects for its energy needs.
Research
The oceans represent the oldest, evolving continuum on Earth with its evolutionary heritage being imprinted within the genes of resident microbes. Microorganisms (i.e., phytoplankton, bacteria, viruses) account for >90% of all oceanic biomass on Earth with their dynamic activities largely driving how the ocean works as a biological system. These small organisms will be the first responders to climate change and will dictate how ocean responds as a healthy system. Still, we are faced with fundamental open questions about the activity, molecular diversity, and evolutionary development of their biochemical and molecular strategies. We remain largely ignorant of key cellular strategies, including stress response, cell communication, signaling, and defense. These are directly relevant to issues of health and biotechnology, such as discovery of novel, active natural metabolites in relation to apoptosis and disease and the molecular control of fine-structured biomaterials. Given that most of Earth’s genetic diversity lies in the oceanic microbial world that has been evolving for ~ 3 billion years, important cellular and medical advances will likely emerge from this realm. A fundamental objective of my research program is to elucidate the activity, diversity and evolution of microbial genes and link them to key oceanic ecosystem and biogeochemical processes, by merging biochemistry, molecular biology, and genome-based approaches with innovative instrumentation. My goals are to not only understand the function and evolution of important molecules/enzymes in an oceanic ecosystem context, but also to apply them to relevant medical and biotechnological initiatives.
Over the past few decades in biological oceanography, much emphasis has been placed on what factors trigger the formation phytoplankton blooms, unicellular photoautrophs that drift with the currents. In contrast, relatively little is known about the mechanisms leading to bloom demise and determining their fate as part of the biological pump. Extensive phytoplankton blooms (~100,000 km2) as viewed from satellite can literally disappear within a matter of days, but we don’t fully understand why. Given that phytoplankton account for ~ 50% of global CO2 fixation, this is a key gap in our understanding. My research attempts to ‘zoom into blooms’ in order to understand the molecular and cellular mechanisms operating within cells that serve to trigger bloom demise. It has been my feeling that, through this approach, we can learn fundamental strategies used by phytoplankton in response to stress and interpret bloom dynamics in a novel context. A major focus of my lab has been to investigate programmed cell death (PCD), or apoptosis, as a universal mortality mechanism in diverse lineages of phytoplankton in response to environmental stress and viral infection. We know a lot about apoptosis in animals largely due to its relationship to cancer. Most cancerous cells have figured out a unique way to ‘deactivate’ an organisms normal apoptosis pathway, which is the way cells normally turnover and are recycled. Through molecular inactivation of apoptosis cancer cells become immortal.
Artist's rendention of 'zooming into a bloom' (credit of: Nivi Alroy)
Interestingly, apoptosis (along with its sophisticated molecular machinery) was not thought to exist in unicellular organisms, like phytoplankton. Our work is fundamentally changing that view and providing a novel paradigm for the evolution of PCD in the oceans. Indeed, we have provided novel molecular insight into phytoplankton mortality and novel ecological and evolutionary context for PCD as an important loss component in natural systems. Planktonic, prokaryotic and eukaryotic photoautotrophs, organisms that evolved well before the first metazoans appear in the fossil record, possess a core set of proteins that function like the metazoan PCD machinery. Our strategy has been to combine a suite of physiological, biochemical, and molecular biology approaches to well-characterized model phytoplankton systems like diatoms, coccolithophores, dinoflagellates and cyanobacteria—the major classes of phytoplankton that dominate the modern ocean.
I am particularly interested in the link between viral infection and PCD. The PCD machinery in phytoplankton may have evolved as a defense mechanism to prevent massive viral infection (and demise) of a population. My lab has been investigating viral infection as a potential evolutionary driver for PCD using an Emiliania huxleyi virus model system. E. huxleyi belongs to the ‘coccolithophores’, a class of unicellular phytoplankton that dominates the modern ocean and mediates the oceanic carbon cycle and biological pump. E. huxleyi is by far the most abundant and cosmopolitan coccolithophore on a global basis, forming massive annual blooms in the North Atlantic, which are routinely infected and terminated by viruses. We have discovered that the sophisticated relationship between E. huxleyi and its virus revolves around the precise control of the apoptotic machinery. Most recently, we have shown that the EhV virus dramatically triggers and actively recruits the host’s apoptotic machinery as part of its replication cycle. Hence, we are discovering fundamental similarities between phytoplankton and animal viruses, which may lead to novel treatments for cancer and disease. Our research also aims to assess the ecological relevance of apoptosis in natural E. huxleyi blooms in the Norwegian Sea and the North Atlantic ocean. We are applying our molecular understanding of this process as tools to assess the importance of virus infection and apoptosis during natural blooms in the oceans.
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