Climate for polar science

The US National Academies of Science are urging the National Science Foundation to mount a big new comparative program of ecosystem-based genomic studies of several arctic and Antarctic organisms. The project's centerpiece is a proposed Polar Genome Science Initiative, according to "Frontiers in Polar Biology in the Genomic Era," a National Research Council (NRC) report released Friday. The study was requested jointly by NSF's Office of Polar Programs and its Biology Directorate. The initiative's sweeping purpose would be "to facilitate genome analysis of polar organisms" and support research on their physiology, biochemistry, and their function in the ecosystems. In addition to the usual attractions of basic research, proponents say, the plan has practical applications that range from biotechnology (understanding hibernation in black bears and Arctic ground squirrels could aid in preserving organs for transplant) to tracking the effects of global climate change (cold-tolerant Polar organisms tend to be intolerant of even small temperature increases.) Given today's US budget limitations, it might be said that this ambitious plan to investigate and compare life in the two coldest regions on Earth has as much chance of surviving as the proverbial snowball in a very hot place. NSF may be due to fare better in the budget inferno than other research funding agencies like the National Institutes of Health. Last week's White House 2004 budget request was considerably more generous to NSF, although it fell far short of the 15% increase needed to fulfill the agency's dream of a doubled budget over the next five years. Still, "A large-scale cross-directorate initiative is unlikely to succeed in this environment," Kei Koizumi, Director of the R&D Budget and Policy Program at the American Association of the Advancement of Science, told The Scientist. Furthermore, polar research funding may be constrained for the next few years, he noted, largely because NSF's 2004 budget request contains $60 million in new money for the IceCube project, a neutrino observatory under the South Pole. On the other hand, Koizumi pointed out, NSF could reallocate its own resources to make room for the Polar genome initiative. "This would of course mean trimming the requests for other programs, but this has certainly happened time and time again with priorities such as biocomplexity, nanoscale science, and fundamental IT." "This is the sort of cross-disciplinary stuff we do all the time, and it certainly wouldn't entail congressional or OMB approval," said Curt Suplee, who directs NSF's Office of Legislative and Public Affairs. While NSF's program managers think the new report's ideas are "interesting and exciting," he said, "it will take quite a while before anybody at NSF can begin to make decisions.""Can all our recommendations be carried out immediately or even in the near future? Certainly not. Can many of them be developed over the long-term? I think so," said H. William Detrich III, who chaired the NRC committee that wrote the new report. "Today's federal budget constraints are very real but our proposals could be implemented incrementally." The report suggests that NSF form a scientific standing committee to establish priorities and coordinate the research, which would include not just large-scale sequencing, but also gene expression studies and research on transcriptomes, proteomes, and—make room for two new buzzwords—"metabolomes" and "ecogenomes." (The report defines metabolomics as the charting of types of substrates, end products and biosynthetic intermediates in a cell and ecogenomics as the use of genome science to study ecology.) Analyzing the results of all these studies would also require substantial new efforts in bioinformatics, including coordinated databases. Organisms to be studied, the report says, should include several prokaryotes, such as the cold-loving bacteria Cowellia and Cyanobacteria, polar plankton, and several metazoans: Antarctic fishes, mammalian hibernators such as the black bear, polar nematodes, plants, and even the rare insect. The report suggests starting (relatively) small, with full-scale genome projects on a couple of metazoans plus functional genomics via EST libraries and microarray studies in another eight or ten organisms. It also emphasizes comparative genomics of Antarctic and arctic organisms with each other and with organisms from temperate zones. Genome sequencing, Detrich suggests, could be handled through a "virtual sequencing center" that would coordinate access to excess sequencing and bioinformatics capacity at the existing Big Three sequencing centers (at Washington University, the Whitehead Institute, and Baylor) as well as others. The report argues that costs of sequencing and sequence assembly are dropping rapidly, and cheaper sequencing technologies are on the horizon. Detrich told The Scientist that the committee is betting that competition between the centers will stimulate this technology development while simultaneously lowering costs. Some polar scientists worry that the report's emphasis on genomics gives short shrift to what it calls "other enabling technologies." "There are important frontiers of polar biology for which genomics is not the ultimate tool, and may not even be a useful one," said Joshua Schimel, of the University of California-Santa Barbara. Genomic exploration of the physiology of the dwarf birch Betula nana, an Arctic shrub, might help explain why its range is expanding, he said. But the key mechanisms appear to be complex biophysical interactions at levels above the organism, which cannot be explained through genomic approaches. "We need balanced support for multiple approaches to understanding polar biology." In general, however, cold-region researchers praise the report warmly. Said Alison Murray, of the Desert Research Institute in Reno Nevada, "We're ready to tackle such a challenging project. There will be nothing short of exciting discoveries all along the way."

Climate for polar science

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