The study entitled “Cryptic Oxygen Cycling in Anoxic Marine Zones”, by the director of the Millennium Institute of Oceanography (IMO) Osvaldo Ulloa together with IMO doctoral student in Oceanography Montserrat Aldunate, was published in the prestigious journal PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences).

A team of researchers from Denmark, the USA, France, and Chile (IMO) demonstrated that small cyanobacteria, inhabiting certain illuminated layers of the ocean where dissolved oxygen cannot be detected, are capable of producing oxygen by photosynthesis.

However, the oxygen produced is immediately consumed by other microorganisms and does not accumulate. To date, anoxic marine zones -important for global nutrient cycles- had been thought to function primarily on the basis of non-oxygen-requiring processes, but this study in waters of the South and North Pacific Ocean suggests that a significant part of the transformations of matter and energy in oceanic waters lacking oxygen occurs on the basis of the close relationship between production and consumption of this element, a cycle that had remained impossible to decipher.

In this regard, IMO student Montserrat Aldunate commented: "For me, it’s very important, because this is a highly-ranked journal that is read by many researchers in the field. Future collaborative relationships could be formed, and, from the point of view of our CV, it also represents an opportunity for future scholarships or postdoctoral programs." It should be noted that last year Aldunate and her thesis supervisor Dr. Osvaldo Ulloa traveled to a major congress in India, where they also presented research projects on the same microorganism.

“This paper makes known the work we are doing and through it we may also be able to cooperate with scientists from other countries. This proves that we are doing world-class science," concluded Monserrat Aldunate.

You can read the research paper at the following link: http://www.pnas.org/content/114/31/8319.abstract