A major long-term goal in our lab is the development and application of methodologies for the rapid identification of particular microorganismal species in nature. Virtually all microorganism identifications are presently done ‘off-line’. That is, water samples are returned to the laboratory for analysis that can take from several hours to several days to complete. This delay is highly undesirable in the case where important decisions must be made (e.g. beach closing in the case of harmful algal blooms). An ideal scenario is one in which identifications can be done in the environment in ‘real time’.

The Center for Embedded Networked Sensing (CENS) is a Science and Technology Center supported by the National Science Foundation. The Center’s office is housed at the University of California, Los Angeles, but member institutions include an array of universities including USC (For more on CENS, go here). The overall goal of the center is to employ smart sensors and actuators embedded in the physical world to make physical and biological measurements and compute courses of action based on those measurements.

Our lab is one component of four CENS applications. Our program is focused on the development and application of new technology for adaptive sampling for marine microorganism. We are investigating novel approaches that include the use of atomic force microscopy with antibody-functional tips as a means of detecting microorganisms in liquid. In addition, we are developing new 'off-line' methodologies for assessing the abundance of microorganisms in natural water samples brought back to the lab. These include the use of flow cytometry to identify and count microbial species (LINK). The work of our collaborators involves the deployment of sensor webs in our laboratory facilities to characterize the temperature structure in the water column. These approaches will eventually provide powerful new tools for monitoring the abundance of targeted species of protists in nature ecosystems.

Our collaborators on this research project include Dr. Ari Requicha of the USC Laboratory for Molecular Robotics and Dr. Gaurav Sukhatme. We are also associated with the USC Center for Robotics and Embedded Systems.