PhD-position: Biominerals, Crystals and Climate

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NIOZ Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research is the National Oceanographic Institution of the Netherlands.

The department of Ocean Systems (OCS: principal investigator dr. Lennart de Nooijer) at the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research (NIOZ) is looking for a highly motivated PhD student with a background in cell biology/ (bio) geochemistry/ chemical oceanography to investigate biomineralization in foraminiferal calcite and its relation to climate change.

ROYAL NIOZ

NWO-NIOZ Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research is the Dutch national oceanographic institute and principally performs academically excellent multidisciplinary, fundamental, and frontier applied marine research addressing important scientific and societal questions pertinent to the functioning of the ocean and seas. NIOZ includes the National Marine research Facilities (NMF) department that operates a fleet of research vessels and the national pool of large seagoing equipment, and supports excellence in multidisciplinary marine research, education, and policy development.

THE DEPARTMENT

The department of Ocean Systems (OCS) studies the role of the ocean in a changing climate, from equator to pole, from the continental shelf to the deep ocean and from the past to the present. The ocean is Earth s largest reservoir of CO2 and heat; circulation, mixing, biogeochemistry and other marine processes strongly impact global climate. Advanced ocean observations allow us to decipher the current and future functioning of the ocean.

Furthermore, seafloor sediments have recorded past changes in conditions on land and in the ocean, in the form of biological residues or physical and chemical signals, which allow us to reconstruct feedbacks between oceanic processes and climate in the (ancient) past. Today, the ocean is changing rapidly because of (human) stressors such as excess CO2, warming and eutrophication. This impacts on the strongly linked but poorly understood ocean processes that control marine ecosystem functioning and thereby climate.

The OCS department investigates ocean functioning by means of sea-going expeditions, during which data and samples are collected from the water column and the seafloor. The samples are analyzed in on-board and on-shore laboratories and we have collected a large information and sample repository over past decades.

THE PROJECT

Within the BICYCLE research project (for a PhD position at the NIOZ and an accompanying position at the Radboud UMC in Nijmegen) we the basics of calcification by one of the most important marine calcifying organisms, the foraminifera. This is directly relevant for marine carbon cycling, atmospheric CO2 levels and thereby, Earth s climate. Our inability to predict how marine calcification will be impacted by climate change, is due to our incomplete understanding of the calcification process.

Marine calcification consists of cellular machinery that
1) takes up ions from seawater (i.e. calcium and carbon) and
2) controls how these ions precipitate into crystalline calcium carbonate (i.e. the shell or skeleton). This project will investigate these two aspects in foraminifera with the aim to construct a complete model of the calcification process. We will specifically identify which parts of the calcification pathway are (most) affected by changes in temperature and CO2, to be able to predict how calcification is affected by climate change.

This in turn, will place a biologically important process into global carbon cycle models and thereby improve predictions of the consequences of ongoing CO2 emissions.

YOUR ROLE

Within this project, you will focus on biochemical/ cellular processes responsible for calcium carbonate precipitation, in particular in relation to seawater pCO2 and temperature. Using a broad array of (analytical) equipment at NIOZ (e.g. confocal laser scanning…