Believe it or not, there is more dead and degraded protein dissolved in the oceans than there is living protein in all the tissues of all the animals on land or in the oceans. It gets worse- there is even more, by a factor of 4 at least, protein dead and decaying in sediments of the oceans than there is in all living creatures. Uuugh. How did it get there? Why is it still there? Why didn’t the bacteria eat it all already? These are the simplified questions we are attempting to answer. Our approach takes a variety of forms.
- isolating amino acids from sediments and waters, and then evaluating their ‘degradation’ signals as a function of location and environmental parameters (download two of our recent articles about this ; Keil et al 1998 and Van Mooy and Keil 2002)
- isolating proteins from sediments without hydrolyzing them to their constituent amino acids first (download our submitted manuscript – Nunn 2004 submitted to L&O Methods)
- evaluations of the sizes and degradation status of proteins isolated from sediments (manuscript to be submitted soon)
- investigation of mass spectral techniques to evbaluate protein hydrolysis in waters and sediments (download Nunn et al 2003)
