For a seacoast city like San Diego, a discovery by researchers at San Diego State University offers hope of solving one of the foulest problems of the coastal economy.
The barnacles, sea squirts, urchins, tubeworms and other marine organisms that grow on ship bottoms slow down vessels and cost billions of dollars a year to remove.
“Biofouling is an economic issue,” said SDSU biologist Nick Shikuma, whose groundbreaking study was released last week.
Shikuma and his colleagues sequenced the genome of the tubeworm hydroides elegans, a frequent biofouling offender that leaves behind calcium carbonate tubes that stick to boats.
Scientists have long known that bacteria on ship bottoms causes the organisms to stick as they mature, and Shikuma’s team found that particular gene is fundamental to the process. Turning off that gene stops the tubeworms from maturing and sticking.
“Tubeworms serve as a model organism to understand how bacteria can orchestrate the dramatic development,” Shikuma said.
Shikuma said that armed with this knowledge, researchers may one day be able to develop ship coastings with biological properties rather than the toxic chemicals that are commonly used now.
The researchers received funding from the Office of Naval Research and published their findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
