Bonding Over Science, Episode 1: How Algae Affects Climate and Human Health

The Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory (EMSL) is excited to announce the launch of the podcast Bonding Over Science, which focuses on scientific discovery made possible through EMSL's proposal calls and capabilities.

Sit down with Bonding Over Science host Dawn Stringer for a chat with Mickey Rogers, a Linus Pauling Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellow at EMSL. Rogers talks about her research on how algae particles in the atmosphere affect climate and human health. They even venture into the fictional HBO series “The Last of Us”  where they compare and dispel similarities between effects of algal blooms to the concepts about a mutant fungus detailed on the show. Should people on the coast be worried about how algal blooms affect their health? Get to know Mickey and her passion for algae. Listen to the episode.

For more information on Rogers’ research, check out the article. 

Transcript

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Dawn Stringer: Fungus needs food to live, and sometimes their food is alive. This is something you may have heard from the HBO hit series, “The Last of Us.” You might be familiar with the fungus mutation that turns ants into insect zombies until it eats them alive. I hope you're finished with your lunch, but that's a topic we'll get into in a future podcast. 

But is it possible for this to happen to people as depicted on TV? I'm Dawn Stringer with Bonding Over Science, let's learn more about this scientific mystery. 

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Dawn Stringer: Hello and welcome to the pilot episode of the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory new podcast, Bonding Over Science. On this episode, EMSL Pauling Fellow Mickey Rogers gives us her take on this topic with her knowledge on the impacts of algae on the climate and our health. While it's not fungus, it's another common biological organism impacting our environment and our bodies, raising the question of the long-term impacts of these organisms. Mickey, thank you for joining me in Bonding Over Science. 

Mickey Rogers: Yeah, thanks for having me, I’m super excited. 

Dawn Stringer: Of course. So, first of all, tell me about yourself. 

Mickey Rogers: So my name is Mickey Rogers. I grew up in Ohio visiting the Lake Erie coast a lot when I was a kid. I graduated from The Ohio State University, and now I'm here as a Linus Pauling distinguished postdoctoral research fellow. And I'm working on the aerosolization of algae. 

 Dawn Stringer: Great. And that's something we're going to be focusing on today. But first, I want to know if you've seen the HBO hit series “The Last Of Us,” the show that everyone's been talking about. 

Mickey Rogers: I haven't yet seen “The Last Of Us,” but my partner and I are waiting patiently, impatiently, to just binge it all entirely when it's done. 

Dawn Stringer: Sounds like a good plan. And if you're not familiar with the show, our listeners listening in, it's about a human-eating fungus that turns people into zombies. Obviously, a very dramatized version of this fungus. And Mickey, we want to know that if any of your research parallels the concern of the health impacts of something like algae going into the air. 

Mickey Rogers: I want to preface this with most algae is really good algae. It's good for the environment, it feeds our ecosystem, a lot of Earth's creatures depend on algae, but there is some algae better known as harmful algal blooms that can release toxins that can contaminate the water. But recent studies are really showing that these can actually end up in our air, too. 

And so if these toxins from these certain species of algae end up in the air, there is a potential health threat there. 

Dawn Stringer: What kind of health impacts are a concern? 

Mickey Rogers: A lot of these toxins that are being released from algae can cause different issues. Some of them can just be respiratory issues that impact your breathing and the lungs. But there are some of these toxins that can actually be neurotoxins and they can come up and actually impact brain function, which is a pretty wild recent finding that people are studying. 

 Dawn Stringer: So not as traumatic as a zombie fungus, but definitely something that we want to learn about. And that's why you're here. 

Mickey Rogers: Yes, exactly. It's not as wild as zombies, but maybe a close step to zombies. 

Dawn Stringer: Well, that's good to hear. Now explain how the algae actually goes into the atmosphere. 

Mickey Rogers: There's different ways the algae can be immersed into the atmosphere. But the main way I'm studying is in the water when there are waves that kind of crash and form, it entrains or pushes air bubbles into the sub water. And as these air bubbles rise up to the surface and burst, they can spray what is in the ocean or the lake or at the water surface into our air. And so the spraying action of these air bubbles that get trapped from waves crashing and forming is how things from the bulk of the water are getting sprayed into our atmosphere. 

Dawn Stringer: Now, when you hear about this stuff, health impacts are definitely a big concern. But what can this also do to the climate? 

Mickey Rogers: We really care about what is getting into the air because these different particles that are captured in these aerosols can do a lot of different things in our atmosphere. They can seed or nucleate cloud formation and ice formation. Solar radiation from the sun can shine on these particles and that can get scattered back down to the earth or back up into the atmosphere, and so understanding what algae and these other species coming from algae are doing in these droplets is really important for us to understand what's happening in our atmosphere. 

Dawn Stringer: You were talking a little bit about the good algae. So what is it and what does it do? 

Mickey Rogers: So like I said, most of the algae, I think NOAA [The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration] said 99% of algae is good algae, it's a friend of ours. It's a food source to what's in the ocean and what's in the different Great Lakes and other bodies of water. And so really, all the creatures that are in the water are dependent on the source of algae as a food supply. 

Dawn Stringer: So when you talk about food supply, that brings me to another pop culture reference. You see in different sci-fi shows where people in outer space use algae to make food, or there's an algae wall at their space station. Is something like that also a little dramatized? Or is that a future that we can see? 

Mickey Rogers: I think that is definitely something that could be in the future. I recently saw on LinkedIn that people are making glass pane office windows and putting algae in them to grow. And so over time, of course, the glass panels are going to be green because they're going to have algae in them, but they're using these glass pane windows to grow algae because these algae can be useful for other things, such as food. Algae is also important for carbon sequestration, which is a really big topic right now. And people are using algae for other uses, such as bioplastics or even biofuels, too. 

Dawn Stringer: How did you get interested in this subject? Because it's a very specific research area. 

Mickey Rogers: So I mentioned in the beginning, I kind of grew up visiting the Great Lakes, Lake Erie coast as a kid, and I remember just seeing all the green, slimy gunk basically in the water and not knowing what it was. And so that always intrigued me. And I learned later through schooling, oh, these are algae, and they can cause harmful algal blooms up in the Great Lakes. And eventually, when I started my PhD, I joined a graduate group that kind of studied atmospheric surface chemistry, and so that's when I learned about aerosol. And so coming here to PNNL, I kind of paired the two together thinking about algae in aerosol, or algae in our atmosphere. 

Dawn Stringer: So how has working with EMSL helped you with your research? 

Mickey Rogers: There's a really great team here called TAP, Terrestrial Atmospheric Processes, and I'm a part of this group now and they are true experts in understanding aerosol. And so the expertise that I'm bringing is kind of understanding a bit more about this biological aerosol field and understanding how algae is getting into the air. And so because this great team is already established here, they already have perfect equipment and instrumentation to understand aerosol. And so I'm using this equipment and instrumentation to understand my part of the piece, which is algae in aerosol. 

Dawn Stringer: What equipment and tools do you have access to at EMSL that you don't at other places? 

Mickey Rogers: In my graduate research, I didn't have a lot of access to imaging tools. But here in the lab we have access to scanning electron microscopy, which is a really great tool to help us visualize these algal particles that are getting up into the air. And based off of the visualization, we can understand their morphology, we can understand their chemical composition, and it can kind of help us to understand what algal particles might be going into the atmosphere and how they might be participating in things like cloud and ice nucleation that I mentioned earlier. 

Dawn Stringer: What is your biggest hope for algae in the future and what we understand? 

Mickey Rogers: Yeah. So there's kind of two parts to this “algae in the air” investigation. So we kind of talked about the algal toxins that could be getting into the air, and I think just making more awareness of this field that's relatively understudied is really important for understanding the health impacts. We just are kind of coming out of this pandemic and that made us think about what's in the air, and we started thinking about wearing masks so that we can protect ourselves from what's in the air. And so maybe during certain extreme weather events like monsoon season or hurricane season, where more algae might be kicked up into the air, there might be a new consideration to wear masks during this time. So maybe new policies could be considered when it comes to airborne algae. But also, like I said, a lot of algae is great, and so thinking about this good algae and kind of putting it in this light of carbon sequestration, and how we can prioritize using this natural carbon source and sequestration tools is another thing that I want to achieve in my fellowship. 

Dawn Stringer: It seems like that's something that could change the world. 

Mickey Rogers: Yeah, I said it a lot, but I really mean it. I think algae are the future and I think that, you know, bringing more awareness to algae, maybe even if it's initially about the toxins that might be released, that's at least bringing awareness to algae and then maybe shifting the attention to the benefits of algae could just get people more interested in it and supporting the research, because I really think the algae can do a lot of different things that we need in the world. 

Dawn Stringer: Now I want to know what's your biggest fear when it comes to learning more about this algae? 

Mickey Rogers: I guess one of my biggest fears is there's a lot of research and awareness of how algae can contaminate the waters. But I'm worried that maybe in my research findings, I will find out just how concerned we should be about algae being in the air, the harmful algal bloom toxins being in the air at least. 

Dawn Stringer: Is there anything else you want the world to know about algae? 

Mickey Rogers: I think you want people to know that algae is a really amazing, resilient, natural resource that we have. And I think more and more research is being focused on it as we need more renewable sources and natural carbon sequestration sources. But I still think it's relatively untapped, and I think that a lot of research could be focused on it and we could help save our planet by focusing on algae. 

Dawn Stringer: So algae are the future. Put it on a bumper sticker. 

Mickey Rogers: Yeah, I truly believe it. Yeah. 

Dawn Stringer: Well, Mickey, thank you so much for joining me on Bonding Over Science with me today. We really appreciate you being here. 

Mickey Rogers: Yeah, thanks so much for having me and definitely working on that bumper sticker for you. 

Dawn Stringer: I love it.  

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There’s so much more to algae than what you see on the surface... or on movies like Soylent Green. NASA is even sending algae to space in hopes of learning about genes that allow organisms like algae to survive there. Mickey isn’t wrong when she says, “Algae are the future.” 

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Thank you for listening to Bonding Over Science, I’m Dawn Stringer for the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory.  

EMSL is a DOE Office of Science national user facility that accelerates scientific discovery and pioneers new capabilities to understand biological and environmental processes across temporal and spatial scales. EMSL leads the scientific community toward a predictive understanding of complex biological and environmental systems to enable sustainable solutions to the nation’s energy and environmental challenges. Learn more at EMSL.PNNL.GOV, that’s EMSL.PNNL.GOV. 

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