UC San Diego Receives $7.35 million for Scripps Center for Oceans and Human Health

Anela Choy examines a lancetfish from the Scripps Marine Vertebrate Collection alongside the stomach contents of a lancetfish collected in collaboration with local fishers. Lancetfish are a deepwater fish whose voracious eating habits can give scientists insights into the marine food web. Credit: Jeff Hester. Amina Schartup is a marine biogeochemist who has led novel research that found warming oceans could lead to an increase in methylmercury in popular seafood. Credit: Kenan Chan.

Choy studies the intricacies of the marine food web — who is eating whom — and impacts of  environmental change on open-sea ecosystems. She has also studied what happens when microplastics enter deep sea marine food webs. This project will examine organisms lower on the food web and from deeper waters such as open ocean fishes, squid and crustaceans in Southern California waters. 

Choy’s previous work demonstrated that methylmercury sources vary with depth, which has implications for how the heavy metal enters and moves through the marine food web. 

By analyzing fish specimens in the lab to measure levels of methylmercury in their tissue and identifying sources of that methylmercury, the researchers can feed this information into climate models to predict how it may affect contaminants and nutrients over time. 

“The vast majority of contaminant work focuses on familiar species at the very top of the food web,” said Choy. “But, how those contaminants between organisms require more study. We want to understand the food web pathways that dictate methylmercury levels in animals that may end up on our dinner plates.” 

The marine microbiome as a source for the synthesis, transformation, and distribution of seafood contaminants

The second research area will analyze the marine microbiome to see how PBDEs, including ones  produced naturally by sea sponges, are made and how they circulate within fish bodies and the larger marine ecosystem. According to Moore, only one atom differentiates natural PBDEs from sea sponges and the human-made chemicals used in making fire retardants. This project aims to understand why organisms make these chemicals and how the PBDEs can degrade both the naturally occurring and human made toxins.

Some of the genetic analysis and sample processing for this effort will take place at the Illumina Labs on campus, which house equipment that allow scientists to screen thousands of cells a day, observe protein evolutions, analyze DNA isolation for microbiome studies, and more. 

This research effort will be led by Moore and Eric Allen, a professor of marine biology and molecular biology with a joint appointment between Scripps and the School of Biological Sciences at UC San Diego. 

Mechanisms of bioaccumulation and developmental toxicity of seafood pollutants

The third research program will be co-led by Scripps marine biologist Amro Hamdoun and Geoffrey Chang, professor at the Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences at UC San Diego, who collaborate to examine how chemicals get into cells. They are zooming in at a molecular level to understand how marine pollutants are transported into organisms, how pollutants further accumulate in the organism and how these pollutants are taken up by the human body. 

“There are some pollutants and chemicals that end up in our bodies and some that don’t accumulate,” said Hamdoun, who will also serve as associate director of the center. “With this research, we hope to understand the biology in the ocean that underlies whether a chemical can accumulate in the body.”  

Hamdoun’s lab works with sea urchins, which like fruit flies have been an organism used in biomedical research for more than a century to understand cell and developmental biology. This program will allow the lab to further examine how pollutants interact during early life stages of embryo development in sea urchins. As model organisms, urchins can aid in our understanding of the health impacts stemming from early-life chemical exposures in humans. 

Chang, an expert on protein structure, will closely examine transporter proteins from both polluted and healthy fish, sea urchins and human cells to uncover the molecular machinery that pollutants leverage to gain access to these organisms. Understanding how organisms survive or adapt to pollutants at a cellular level could reveal new ways humans can protect ourselves from seafood contaminants. 

The Hamdoun Lab uses sea urchins as model organisms for studying gene activity during development. Hamdoun will serve as the associate director of the center. The Chang lab is pictured in the fermentation room where the transporter proteins from polluted and healthy fish, sea urchins and human cells will be produced in yeast. Their research could reveal how pollutants accumulate in these organisms. Both images credited to Erik Jepsen. 

Community Engagement

The Scripps Center for Oceans and Human Health will also engage with the public to build capacity for public health risk prevention while highlighting the health benefits of consuming fish.

Theresa Talley, a coastal specialist with California Sea Grant and Scripps, and Sarah Mesnick, an ecologist at NOAA Fisheries Southwest Fisheries Science Center and an adjunct faculty member at Scripps, will serve as community engagement leads. 

Community engagement activities will integrate the research from this center with other current science to provide resources for the public and other stakeholders. This effort helps to ensure that the benefits of seafood consumption outweigh any risks. Community engagement activities could include web-based resources, seafood education events with chefs at the demonstration kitchen at the Marine Conservation and Technology Facility at Scripps, and partnerships with fishing communities in the San Diego region. Through these collaborations, they aim to improve understanding of local seafood and co-create accurate and effective information resources.

“A lack of clear links between many contaminants and human health often leaves people confused and uncertain of what to look for or eat, and reacting to the latest news cycle,” said Mesnick. “Our goal is to build and foster lasting partnerships with communities to better understand needs and barriers to accessing and using information about seafood sustainability and safety.”

“This Center’s discoveries will improve our understanding of mechanisms for how contaminants and micronutrients move, accumulate, and affect marine organisms and ocean food webs,” added Talley, who recently published a paper examining the contamination risks and social vulnerability associated with recreational shellfish harvest in San Diego Bay. “While many additional steps will be needed to understand how these findings apply to seafood safety and human health, these discoveries will contribute to a larger conversation about the complexities of contaminant dynamics, including how risks may vary with species, interactions with other compounds like nutrients, and changing climatic conditions.” 

This NIH and NSF grant marks the re-forming of the Scripps Center for Oceans and Human Health, which had been supported from 2013-2018. The center was originally launched to examine emerging contaminants found naturally in common seafoods, as well as man-made chemicals that accumulate in human breast milk. The revived center will expand human health research at Scripps, which is also home to its Center for Marine Biotechnology and Biomedicine, which emphasizes marine drug discovery, the ocean microbiome, molecular epidemiology, marine cell biology and development, and the physiology of marine mammals.