Lauren Gillies Campbell

Area of research

Environmental Chemistry · Ecology

Research interest

Research topics from publications: Extent of the annual Gulf of Mexico hypoxic zone influences microbial community structure; Metagenomics and metatranscriptomics reveal broadly distributed, active, novel methanotrophs in the Gulf of Mexico hypoxic zone and in the marine water column; Metagenomic Assembly and Prokaryotic Metagenome-Assembled Genome Sequences from the Northern Gulf of Mexico “Dead Zone”. Representative work: Rich geochemical datasets generated over the past 30 years have provided fine-scale resolution on the northern Gulf of Mexico (nGOM) coastal hypoxic (≤ 2 mg of O2 L-1) zone. In contrast, little is known about microbial community structure and activity in the hypoxic zone despite the implication that microbial respiration is responsible for forming low dissolved oxygen (DO) conditions. Here, we hypothesized that the extent of the hypoxic zone is a driver in determining microbial community structure, and in particular, the abundance of ammonia-oxidizing archaea (AOA). Samples collected across the shelf for two consecutive hypoxic seasons in July 2013 and 2014 were analyzed using 16S rRNA gene The northern Gulf of Mexico (nGOM) hypoxic zone is a shallow water environment where methane, a potent greenhouse gas, fluxes from sediments to bottom water and remains trapped due to summertime stratification. When the water column is destratified, an active planktonic methanotrophic community could mitigate the efflux of methane, which accumulates to high concentrations, to the atmosphere. To investigate the possibility of such a biofilter in the nGOM hypoxic zone we performed metagenome assembly, and metagenomic and metatranscriptomic read mapping. Methane monooxygenase (pmoA) was an abundant transcript, yet few canonical methanotrophs have been reported in this environment, suggesting a