Microorganisms may be invisible to the naked eye, but they are everywhere and are now the impetus behind a grant offered to the University of Hawaii at Manoa.
A group of researchers at UH-Manoa has received a $10.4 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to study microbiomes, or the community of microorganisms such as bacteria, fungi and viruses, that live everywhere, and their impact on human health.
The five-year NIH Centers of Biomedical Research Excellence (COBRE) grant will be awarded to five researchers at the university, who together will create an Integrative Center for Environmental Microbiomes and Human Health. Their research topics range from how microorganisms affect waterways, mosquito guts and disease transmission to genetics and autism behavior.
“UH is well positioned for this,” said grant recipient Mathew Medeiros. “We’ve got a good team. Each of us is looking at how microorganisms are mediating that important link between human health and the environment … and we have such an amazing environment to contextualize our research, to do our field studies in.”
While microbiomes in the human gut have become a trendy topic, Medeiros, an assistant professor at UH’s Pacific Biosciences Research Center, is examining the microbiome within the guts of mosquitoes in nature and how environmental factors potentially affect the transmission of diseases.
One species of mosquito — the tiger mosquito (Aedes albopictus) — that is widespread in Hawaii carries dengue, Zika and chikungunya.
Hawaii, where Medeiros grew up hiking and looking for native birds, is unique in that it offers so much diversity within a small, geographic area to conduct this research, he said, with a large range of elevations, rainfall and temperatures.
Medeiros and his team have collected mosquitoes at habitats ranging from the summit of Tantalus to the depths of Waimea Valley on Oahu, as well as from Haleakala, Hana and Kahului on Maui.
In the lab, meanwhile, they will be able to set up controlled experiments and analyze how various microbes in mosquito guts perform across various environmental variables, including temperature. Knowledge of these microbes is potentially valuable for preventing the transmission of diseases.
The grant comes at an exciting time in microbiome research because DNA sequencing technology is now available, according to Medeiros, 35. It offers researchers much more information at a fraction of the cost, he said, and the ability to ask much more sophisticated questions.
“Now we’ve got this window, this way to look at the microscopic world in such a profound way,” he said. “It’s really driving a revolution in biology that is now appreciating just how fundamental these microorganisms are in terms of controlling biological processes that we see at the macroscopic level. The mosquito microbiome and its many links to disease transmission is just one example of that — of how microorganisms are behind the scenes controlling this process in ways that are quite profound.”
Growing up in Kailua, PBRC assistant professor Kiana Frank became fascinated with mud, its composition and its taste.
Frank, 32, heard stories from her grandmother about the edible mud at Kawainui Marsh that nourished King Kamehameha’s warriors, and she has been on the search for it. While she hasn’t yet discovered the mud, she found her calling as a scientist focused on microbes, or microorganisms, in the ecosystem stretching from mountain to sea.
She has had a fascination for this invisible world.
“There’s more microbes in the ocean than there are stars in the universe, and if you were to take everything in the ocean and put it on a scale, 90 percent of that mass would be things that you cannot see; it would be microbial,” she said.
With the grant, Frank will evaluate how land management practices and environmental factors influence microbial threats to Hawaii watersheds. This is particularly important in the 21st century, she said, as land management practices have changed drastically.
“This grant is really exciting because it’s really one of the first of its kind looking at the environment and health put together through the lens of microbes,” she said. “So there’s a lot of interaction between human and environment and human and human at the microbial layer, which is really influencing our health and our well-being.”
As both a scientist and a Native Hawaiian, Frank sees the world of microbes through a cultural lens.
“I like to think of microbes as being part of the unseen realm,” said Frank. “Microbes are everywhere but we can’t see them. But I really feel like our kupuna were really familiar with these microbes, even though they couldn’t see them, and they developed a lot of their management practices accordingly.”
Frank cites a line from the Kumulipo, a Hawaiian creation chant which refers to slime, which she interprets as the very microorganisms that she researches. Frank said she thinks of beneficial microbes as a “Hiiaka element,” referring to the goddess’s powers, because “they’re transforming something raw and uninhabitable into something habitable where life can flourish.”
“So they’ve been cycling all these elements and nutrients so that we can survive,” she said.
As part of the grant, videos in both English and Hawaiian will be produced to accompany the research findings and explain why it is important to the Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander community.
GRANTED
A $10.4 million NIH Centers of Biomedical Research Excellence (COBRE) grant
Five UH-Manoa researchers received the grant, which runs through 2023:
>> Kiana Frank, assistant professor, Pacific Biosciences Research Center (PBRC), who is evaluating how land use patterns and environmental factors influence the diversity, abundance, virulence and persistence of waterborne microbial threats to Hawaii watersheds.
>> Matthew Medeiros, assistant professor, PBRC, who is looking at how microbes colonize mosquitoes in nature and how this pattern of colonization might affect disease transmission.
>> Floyd Reed, associate professor, Department of Biology, who is investigating the effect of the mosquito’s normal microbiota on its carriage of Wolbachia, and the ability of this bacterium to curb the carriage of human pathogens by the mosquito.
>> Joanne Yew, assistant professor, PBRC, who is using the powerful genetic model Drosophila (small fruit flies) to study the interplay between genetics and the environment.
>> Masato Yoshizawa, assistant professor, Department of Biology, who is researching how microbiomes dwelling in Mexican textra, or blind cave fish, might correlate with autism behavior in humans.
