Education:
SB 1977 Biology- Massachusetts Institute of Technology
PhD 1981 Oceanography- University of California at San Diego
Started at USC: 1988
Research Topics: Marine Biology
Research Description
I am a marine microbial ecologist and oceanographer with interests in the roles of various prokaryotic and eukaryotic microorganisms and viruses in marine food webs, and in the general cycling of matter in the sea. Recent studies have shown that these organisms are responsible for the vast majority of biological activity in the world oceans.
My lab is exploring global marine microbial biodiversity by molecular biological techniques. The older, more conventional techniques only examine about 1% of the members of the communities, so studies have generally treated the communities as indistinguishable "black boxes." We are using nucleic acid hybridization and sequencing of 16s ribosomal RNA genes to study the entire community,irrespective of cultivability. We have begun to delineate the scales of variability in time and space of microbial species compositions. Results have been new and exciting. The communities are extremely diverse. Recently, we have discovered a major new group of Archaea inhabiting the deep sea and other novel microbial groups in coral reefs. Some of these groups are as different from any previously-known organism as are animals from plants.
We have found that marine viruses are highly abundant and active, primarily in the infection of indigenous prokaryotes. Our work has shown that perhaps half of the total mortality of marine prokaryotes is due to viruses. This has many ecological and biogeochemical implications about the way marine systems function. The investigation of these is one of our current priorities.
We also measure human pathogenic viruses at recreational beaches, as a potential health hazard, and are working on ways to make such measurements relatively easy and inexpensive.
Note: The publications listed below were obtained from the PubMed database. Unfortunately this database does not index publications in many important journals in the field of environmental and marine biology and thus does not include many of Dr. Fuhrman's most notable publications. For more information about his research and publications, please visit his other website given at the top of this page. Thank you.
Selected Publications
Fuhrman JA, Steele JA, Hewson I, Schwalbach MS, Brown MV, Green JL, Brown JH. - A latitudinal diversity gradient in planktonic marine bacteria. - Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A [ 2008 ] May 28; . PubMed
Fuhrman JA, Schwalbach MS, Stingl U. - Proteorhodopsins: an array of physiological roles? - Nat Rev Microbiol [ 2008 ] Jun;6(6):488-94 . PubMed
Horner-Devine MC, Silver JM, Leibold MA, Bohannan BJ, Colwell RK, Fuhrman JA, Green JL, Kuske CR, Martiny JB, Muyzer G, Ovre??s L, Reysenbach AL, Smith VH. - A comparison of taxon co-occurrence patterns for macro- and microorganisms. - Ecology [ 2007 ] Jun;88(6):1345-53 . PubMed
Patel A, Noble RT, Steele JA, Schwalbach MS, Hewson I, Fuhrman JA. - Virus and prokaryote enumeration from planktonic aquatic environments by epifluorescence microscopy with SYBR Green I. - Nat Protoc [ 2007 ] 2(2):269-76 . PubMed
Hewson I, Jacobson Meyers ME, Fuhrman JA. - Diversity and biogeography of bacterial assemblages in surface sediments across the San Pedro Basin, Southern California Borderlands. - Environ Microbiol [ 2007 ] Apr;9(4):923-33 . PubMed
Hewson I, Fuhrman JA. - Characterization of lysogens in bacterioplankton assemblages of the southern California borderland. - Microb Ecol [ 2007 ] May;53(4):631-8 . PubMed
Fuhrman JA, Hewson I, Schwalbach MS, Steele JA, Brown MV, Naeem S. - Annually reoccurring bacterial communities are predictable from ocean conditions. - Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A [ 2006 ] Aug 29;103(35):13104-9 . PubMed
Ruan Q, Dutta D, Schwalbach MS, Steele JA, Fuhrman JA, Sun F. - Local similarity analysis reveals unique associations among marine bacterioplankton species and environmental factors. - Bioinformatics [ 2006 ] Oct 15;22(20):2532-8 . PubMed
Ruan Q, Steele JA, Schwalbach MS, Fuhrman JA, Sun F. - A dynamic programming algorithm for binning microbial community profiles. - Bioinformatics [ 2006 ] Jun 15;22(12):1508-14 . PubMed
Noble RT, Griffith JF, Blackwood AD, Fuhrman JA, Gregory JB, Hernandez X, Liang X, Bera AA, Schiff K. - Multitiered approach using quantitative PCR to track sources of fecal pollution affecting Santa Monica Bay, California. - Appl Environ Microbiol [ 2006 ] Feb;72(2):1604-12 . PubMed
