Saving Marine DNA from Extinction

“It’s not difficult to do,” said Dan Distel, a marine biologist who serves as the director of Northeastern University’s Ocean Genome Legacy Center. “It’s not expensive to do. And of course, if we miss the opportunity, it’s too late.” The center, a packed maze of lab equipment and preserved samples, and other biorepositories like it are increasingly crucial to climate change research. The Nahant collection has informed hundreds of studies, providing a baseline understanding of how species are doing while also tracking global trends. The repository houses common local species, such as spiky sea urchins and flatfish with their eyes trained skyward. But there are also some “real weirdos,” as Distel described them. A prized specimen from the Philippines is a preserved giant shipworm, a glistening, tubular creature that lives in a tusk-like shell. A petite marine mussel the size and shape of a plump grain of rice rests in a small jar. A whiteboard at its entrance decorated with drawings of fish, sea stars, and a crab displays the current count: over 31,000 DNA samples and 28,000 tissue samples. Distel is the ringmaster behind the menagerie. He is excited to expound on the oddities of the natural world, and is just as ready to pull back and lay out the sobering big picture of what will happen if they vanish. In addition to his work at the center, he has dedicated much of his career to studying shipworms, a type of worm-like clam notorious for gnawing through submerged wood. Distel was part of an international team that discovered a live specimen of the giant shipworm, a find that drew international attention. On a recent afternoon, he brought out the shipworm’s shell, secured with foam in a case. The body of the creature laid coiled in a jar nearby. “These guys are a great example of a nearly extinct species,” he said, with a touch of reverence. “There’s only one place in the world where we know they can still be found.” As humanity continues to burn fossil fuels, the world’s oceans have stood as a bulwark to the most extreme impacts of climate change by swallowing much of the excess heat trapped by greenhouses gases. But that has come at a staggering cost. The surface layer of the ocean has warmed by about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit over the past century. In the Gulf of Maine, which is warming much faster than most ocean surfaces on the planet, the higher temperatures are forcing out lobsters, altering the migration patterns of whales, and fueling a population boom of invasive green crabs. The center was founded in 2004 by Donald Comb, a Massachusetts biotechnology pioneer who also started New England Biolabs. He died in 2020. In Distel’s telling, Comb read an article in an academic journal asking why scientists weren’t preserving DNA from organisms suspected of disappearing. Comb, who loved the oceans, decided to put up the funds to build a biorepository focused on marine species. The center became the first ocean-focused public DNA bank in the United States. “When a species goes extinct, you lose a lot of information,” Comb told the Globe in 2005. “Someday, I believe, we’ll be able to bring some back.” The number of biorepositories — housed at museums, research institutions, and nonprofits — has continued to grow. The federal government operates several, including through the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. Scientists have even envisioned putting a vault on the moon, safe from catastrophes on earth, where the samples would be chilled by the naturally low temperatures in outer space. The Nahant center is on the site of a former World War II military facility and Cold War missile launch site. The center has taken over the former kitchen of the military barracks. Large samples preserved in jars are stored in shelving units and a repurposed tool chest. They infuse the center with what students call “the low tide smell.” The real action takes place in the freezer room. Four mechanical freezers, rigged with alarms and known as “minus 80s” for their low temperatures, store small tubes that contain the complete genome of an organism. A single freezer can fit thousands of samples. The center also has a liquid nitrogen freezer that chills samples so quickly that living bacteria can be revived. Researchers can request samples from the repository. The center also contributes data to a global biodiversity data network that is free to access. Angela Jones, a Northeastern PhD candidate in marine and environmental sciences, has supplied the center with samples from her doctoral research on sea stars, studying two species in New England that have undergone steep population declines. On a recent afternoon, she lifted three sea stars of varying sizes and sunset hues out of a tank. To the untrained eye, they looked like different species. But Jones knew all three were Forbes sea stars, found along the Gulf of Maine. She studies the range of variation within sea star species, as well as how these differences change their vulnerability to sea star wasting disease, an aggressive condition that turns the stars into mush. She uses forceps to grab a few of the jelly-like appendages that sea stars use for locomotion and sends the samples to the center, which does DNA extraction and puts the samples into the database. “It’s important to understand what the species are like now so that we can understand how they change under worsening conditions,” she said. That data is used by academics such as Noam Vogt-Vincent, an associate professor of climate science at Oxford. He built a computer model that predicts how climate change will impact coral populations. Warming waters have driven widespread bleaching of corals. To test his model, Vogt-Vincent drew on a database of over 400,000 data points of where corals have been found. About 400 came from samples stored in Nahant, most collected from Florida, Bermuda, and the Great Barrier Reef. There was no way he could have gone out and observed that volume of corals on his own. “To get a holistic global understanding of how these ecosystems respond to environmental change, we absolutely have to have these global data,” he said.