Distant Early Warning System
December 05 / January 06
Volume 3 Number 6
Imagine a world where you can prevent disease from happening. Imagine predicting environmental damage before a pesticide is produced and marketed, or fewer tradeoffs between a healthy economy and a healthy environment. Researchers at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory are doing more than just imagine.
The destruction of ecosystems, such as rivers or cities, brings physical, emotional and financial burdens. These burdens could be lightened if assessing environmental damage changed from describing the response of a single organism to predicting the response of an entire system. For national security agencies, health care providers and agriculture industries, systems-based prediction could provide swift, noninvasive detection of diseases before they spread. For pesticide and other chemical manufacturers, safer products and less financial liability.
Using the traditional method, when a river, city or other ecosystem shows signs of damage, researchers collect samples and analyze them for a single response in one or more organisms to describe the damage. This approach is limited. It only works when the system shows symptoms, which often indicates an advanced state of degradation. The consequent response can easily cost billions, and the ecosystem may never fully recover.
Through PNNL's Environmental Biomarkers Initiative, this approach is about to change.
The New Canaries
In times past, canaries were the environmental sentinels in the mine shaft. Tomorrow the canary will live. Only its biomarkers will be needed to ward off danger. Environmental biomarkers are a collection of molecular signatures associated with ecosystem functions, such as photosynthesis. Biomarkers are easily measured surrogates for complex biological processes. For example, specific proteins produced in common rock slime in river beds exposed to uranium show responses before any signs of the damage are visible to the human eye.
Biomarkers are triggered by a stressor, something that upsets the system. Stressors can include chemicals, viruses and bacteria. In addition, stressors can include physical changes, from localized changes in water temperature near a power plant to global climate change. Stressors can occur separately or in combinations. The presence or absence of biomarkers provides an early warning that a dangerous stressor, or combination of stressors, is present.
PNNL researchers envision that the use of biomarkers to predict eco-damage and human or animal disease. Because problems would be identified and characterized at the early response stage, rather than at the disease stage, accidental or intentional releases to the environment could be quickly detected and controlled, minimizing loss of life and economic damages.
An early warning siren
To predict eco-damage before it happens requires the will to do the work and the synergistic application of three key tools.
First, researchers must have an in-depth understanding of environmental systems. Hydrology, geology, biology and other environmental sciences explain the functions of a system, as well as the fate and transport of possible stressors. PNNL scientists have more than 40 years experience with environmental systems around the world, including nuclear waste sites, military bases and energy plants.
Second, researchers must have an in-depth understanding of toxicological science on the molecular level. By studying the genetic and proteomic responses throughout an organism, researchers use toxicology to focus the broader environmental science on the response, regardless of where it occurs in the system. High-throughput proteomics, high-powered nuclear magnetic resonance instrumentation and other resources at the lab strongly support this work.
Finally, researchers must have high-performance computing systems to gather, integrate, analyze and store terabytes of static and streaming data. The lab has the technologies to do this, including a supercomputer with a peak performance of 11.8 teraflops and 6.8 terabytes of memory, making it one of the fastest computers in the world. To detect expected and discover unexpected patterns and abnormalities in these massive and ambiguous data sets, PNNL researchers use innovative statistical analysis as well as modeling and visual analytics techniques.
Sounding the alarm
Scientists are delving into microbial communities and water-based ecosystems, supported by Department of Energy funding. For example, using the hyporeheic zone, where underground streams meet up with rivers and lakes, researchers are developing a tool to assess an ecosystem's response to physical or chemical perturbations.
Called the Tree of Life chip, this tool will quickly and accurately assess the diverse relationships among organisms and the abundance or lack of organisms in the system. The chip will also examine the expression of key genes within complex microbes, such as algae and fungi. Constructed to detect a broad variety of organisms and critical microbial functions, the chip will be useful in many different environments.
Through this project, PNNL researchers hope to find environmental biomarkers that indicate chemical pollutants have entered this important freshwater zone. The chip will allow regulators, manufacturers and cleanup experts to rapidly identify threats and perform timely and economical responses.
Will the Tree of Life chip and other predictive environmental tools be ready to go to market tomorrow? No. The tools and the vision are in place. The hard work has begun. The technologies that will move environmental assessments and management from describing damage to predicting it are not here yet, but they will be.
And when they arrive, these technologies will revolutionize our relationship with the environment.
Terri Stewart leads the Environmental Biomarkers Initiative for the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.
Copyright © 2012 | Innovation America