Humboldt Awardee comes to Bremen

Renowned geochemist Roger Summons receives prestigious Humboldt Award for research in Bremen

It is official: at the end of this year, the internationally renowned organic geochemist and geobiologist Roger Summons, Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), will spend his sabbatical at the Universities of Bremen and Oldenburg. His stay is financed by a Humboldt Research Award carrying 50.000 Euro and by a fellowship at the Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg in Delmenhorst. His long-term colleagues Kai-Uwe Hinrichs from the Department of Geosciences and MARUM_Research Center Ocean Margins, Bremen, and Jürgen Rüllkötter from the Institute for Chemistry and Biology of the Marine Environment (ICBM) in Oldenburg nominated him. Together, they will develop new proxies for studying the role of cyanobacteria in recent and ancient marine environments.

“In ecological, geobiological and biogeochemical terms, cyanobacteria, also known as blue-green algae, are among the most important photosynthetic primary producers. They played a leading role in the transformation of early Earth’s atmosphere. At least 2.7 billion years ago, they started producing oxygen and thereby paved the way for the evolution of higher life forms. Up to now, there have been no unambiguous methods for detecting their presence in the fossil record”, explains Kai-Uwe Hinrichs, Professor of Organic Geochemistry at MARUM. “We are very glad that our nomination of Roger was successful. To host a world-class researcher such as Roger in Bremen is costly and would have been impossible without the generous support of the Humboldt Foundation and the Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg.”

Summons is one of the leading experts in the field of Organic Geochemistry. For many years, he has been searching for biochemical tracers documenting the evolution of life and the composition of the biosphere on early Earth. His research concentrates on molecular fossils, i.e., the remnants of cellular lipids of ancient organisms. Their molecular skeletons remain recognizable for millions of years, safely embedded in stone. By detecting biomarkers also known from modern eukaryotes in rocks as old as 2.7 billion years, in 1999 Summons and his colleagues provided compelling evidence that the evolution of eukaryotes pre-dated earlier estimates derived from other techniques by about one billion years. Moreover, certain compounds found only in modern cyanobacteria gave testimony to the establishment of the process of oxygenic photosysnthesis.

The planned research is technically very demanding. It will be carried out with modern and ancient samples. The latter, however, with an age of only 100 million years, are comparatively young. For the first time, samples from the seafloor, the water column, and from cultured organisms will be analyzed in concert with the inventories of so-called biohopanoids, i.e., a group of compounds that play a role in cyanobacteria analogous to that of steroids in eukaryotes such as plants and animals. “The project will benefit from the excellent laboratory facilities in Bremen and Oldenburg as well as the international core repository by the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program at MARUM, harboring the ideal samples for the project . The highly polar, complex biohopanoids, characteristic of the “fresh” organic material contained in organisms young sediment, will be analyzed in Hinrichs’ lab, while in Oldenburg, we will analyze trace amounts of their geochemically altered counterparts in fossil samples”, declares Jürgen Rüllkötter from the ICBM.

The collaboration between Summons and Hinrichs has led to a fruitful exchange of young scientists between Cambridge and Bremen. For example, Summons and Hinrichs are jointly supervising a graduate student from the DFG-funded graduate college EUROPROX and a postdoctoral fellow currently at Bremen; in return, several undergraduate students from MIT spent their summers participating in RCOM’s summer student program. But the extended visit of Roger Summons will be the first time that the three can work closely together at the same place for a prolonged period of time. “This offers a different quality of co-operation and scientific exchange, and we are looking forward to the progress to be made during Roger’s stay”, comments Hinrichs on the value of the award.

Further Information/interviews/pictures:

Name	Phone	Fax	e-mail
Achenbach, Kirsten	+49  421 218 - 65541	+49  421 218 - 65505
Hinrichs, Kai-Uwe	+49  421 218 - 65700	+49  421 218 - 65715