By Diana Kenney

Fresh ideas propel scientific discovery, but so do inventions, as the career of Elizabeth ‘Liz’ Jonas vividly shows. And Jonas’s invention happened in classic Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) style: with salvaged sculpture wire, purple tape, and dashes of ingenuity, collaboration and laughter. It enabled years of future research that eventually led her to close in on an elusive accomplice in cell death associated with many serious disorders, including neurodegenerative disease.

Jonas was an undergraduate at Yale in 1980 when she got the chance to spend a summer at the MBL observing neuroscientist Rodolfo Llinas of New York University. Llinas was describing the properties of neurotransmission -- the electro-chemical conversation that passes between neurons  -- using Woods Hole squid as his research organism. In squid, there is one communication junction between neurons that is “giant”– it’s 200 times larger than the largest human synapse -- making this an ideal organism for studying neurotransmission. (See animation.)

“It was a really exciting summer,” Jonas says. “The squid boat (then the Loligo; today it’s the Gemma) would roll in between 11:30 AM and 3 PM with the day’s catch, and then the scientists would stay up all night doing experiments. I learned a tremendous amount and I just loved every minute of it.”

Len Kaczmarek and Liz Jonas of Yale University in their Whitman Center lab at MBL in 2001. Credit: J. Marie Hardwick

Jonas was hooked. After earning her M.D. and completing her residency training in Neurology, Jonas joined the lab of Leonard (Len) Kaczmarek at Yale as a postdoctoral scientist. Here, she worked with Kaczmarek on cutting-edge investigations of the class of proteins called ion channels that regulate a neuron’s excitability, or its ability to conduct charge. Kaczmarek co-directed the MBL Neurobiology course for five summers in the early ‘90s.

A Crazy Idea

The next summer, Jonas had what she calls a “crazy idea” and convinced Kaczmarek to return to the MBL Whitman Center to explore it. “It wasn’t difficult,” says Kaczmarek. “My family wanted to come back. My kids had grown up here. They love Woods Hole.”

Jonas’s idea? Rather than recording electrical current across the neuron’s outer membrane, Jonas wanted to try and record conductances inside the neuron -- from the membranes of its tiny, internal organelles.

“We started working on this at Yale, but we realized that a nice preparation in which to try this would be squid,” Jonas says. And the only place to get squid was the MBL.

Once back in Woods Hole in an MBL lab, they zoomed in on recording from organelles inside the squid presynaptic terminal, where neurotransmitter is packaged for release.

Jonas had a problem, however. Her idea called for two electrodes that move relative to each other, but she couldn’t find a way to apply the force needed for them to move.

“We finally solved that problem using a piece of sculpture wire that Len’s wife had as part of her art supplies,” Jonas said, “and some purple tape. Steven Zottoli, a neuroscientist at MBL from Williams College, subsequently claimed that it was his roll of purple tape! He put up notices all over the lab stating he had invented the Purple Tape Wire. That became a playful bone of contention -- Now we’d have to get the legal teams involved! We had a lot of fun with that.”
 

Liz Jonas dissecting out the squid giant synapse at the MBL in the early 2000s. Credit: J. Marie Hardwick

An electrophysiology rig for recording electrical activity from neurons in the Jonas-Kaczmarek-Hardwick lab in 2001. Photo: J. Marie Hardwick

 
The Life and Death of a Neuron

Jonas’s technique opened a whole new world of inquiry inside neurons. She began recording from “very unusual, large-conductance ion channels” within the squid presynaptic terminal. With Joanne Buchanan at MBL, she eventually found that the recordings were coming from mitochondrial membranes. In nerve cells, mitochondria supply the energy for neurotransmission, among other functions. Most intriguingly, it was known that if a particular channel on the mitochondrial membrane remains open too long -- in any type of cell -- the cell will die.

“Various kinds of stresses, such as the lack of blood supply known as ischemia, can open this channel,” says Jonas. “It’s involved in diseases of the nervous system, heart, kidney, liver, muscle, pancreas; in diabetes, cancer – almost any organ you can think of,” she says.

But at the time nobody knew – and it’s still debated today – what membrane proteins form this important channel, known as the mitochondrial permeability transition pore (mPTP).

“It’s one of the Holy Grails of mitochondrial biology. What is the molecular identity of the mPTP?” says J. Marie Hardwick of Johns Hopkins Medicine, whose lab studies cell suicide and its role in disease.

Cell suicide (programmed cell death) is part of the normal development of an organism, as unneeded cells are pruned out. But in neurodegenerative disease, “cells die when they aren’t supposed to. The other side of that is cancer, when tumor cells manage to avoid cell death,” Hardwick says.

Jonas joined the Yale faculty in 2002 and dedicated a portion of her lab work to tracking down the ion channel associated with the mPTP. Soon after, Hardwick began coming regularly to MBL to collaborate in the quest, at the suggestion of her and Kaczmarek’s colleague, John Hickman. Hardwick is particularly interested in a family of proteins, called Bcl-2, known to regulate cell death.

“It took three summers before we could publish our first joint paper on this, because the squid weren’t available anywhere else,” says Hardwick. “We had a big tub of squid in the lab and many messy experiments.” In true MBL fashion, they collaborated with each other and MBL technical staff to supply materials and equipment, perform experiments and interpret the data. “Those were very fun times,” Hardwick remembers.

The Woods Hole squid (Doryteuthis pealeii) has a giant synapse – 200 times bigger than the largest human synapse -- making it an ideal organism for studying neurotransmission. Credit: Roger Hanlon

The team identified a candidate for the mPTP in 2011 and 2014, though their findings were controversial.

“Liz came under fire for this, but my perception now is that a lot of people are paying attention to it. Liz gets it right. She is a very daring scientist,” Hardwick says.

“We know for a fact that we’ve identified the largest-conductance channel on the mitochondrial inner membrane to date. But at this point, to say this is the only mPTP would be incorrect,” says Jonas. “There are many channels, and they are all participating in permeability of the membrane. The question is: Which are involved in the complex phenomenon of mitochondrial permeability transition, and how do those channels work together?”

Jonas’s lab is actively collaborating to develop drugs to close the mPTP under pathological conditions, as are other labs around the world.

Equally important, Jonas’s lab has unearthed surprising fundamentals about the role of the mPTP.

“Not only is it a cause of cell death, we’ve discovered it’s a major regulator of metabolism,” she says. “It regulates body weight, temperature, and the metabolic switches that can activate cells.” Jonas published her first big paper on regulation of neuronal developmental metabolism by the putative mPTP in Cell, 2020.

MBL as a Second Home

While Jonas’s lab stopped using squid several years go (it now uses mammalian systems), she and Kaczmarek still spend every summer at MBL “because we love it here,” Jonas says. They and their families have raised children here, and they’ve trained countless students in their MBL lab. Many of their students learn electrophysiology (a technique few labs now perform), but also cell imaging. These students are learning “from the best,” Hardwick says.
 

The Jonas-Kaczmarek-Hardwick lab at MBL is often bursting with student trainees, as shown in this photo from 2006. “We’ve had as many as 10 or 11 students in our lab” over the course of a summer, says Jonas. Credit: J. Marie Hardwick

Liz Jonas, Steve Zottoli (center, trustee of the Grass Foundation/Grass Lab at MBL), and Len Kaczmarek with students in 2006. Credit: J. Marie Hardwick

 
“What’s exciting about electrophysiology is you see the brain working,” says Kaczmarek. “You see channels opening, neurons firing, ensembles of neurons. And you see your results during the experiment.”

Their labs enjoy taking multiple approaches: electrophysiology, imaging, biochemistry, genetics and computation. “We believe that if you want to solve a problem, you’ve got to find the technique that will help you solve it,” Jonas says.

Hardwick also comes back to MBL each summer, family in tow, to continue her fruitful collaborations. In recent years, she has taken a keen interest in whether single-celled organisms, such as yeast and microbes, also undergo cell suicide – a provocative idea that has caught the interest of other scientists at MBL.

“The MBL enables you to really appreciate collaborations, teaching and mentoring,” Jonas says.

Len Kaczmarek and Liz Jonas of Yale University and J. Marie Hardwick of Johns Hopkins Medicine in their Whitman Center lab at MBL in 2021. Photo courtesy of J. Marie Hardwick

References:

Jonas EA, Buchanan J, Kaczmarek LK (1999) Prolonged activation of mitochondrial conductances during synaptic transmission. Science. doi: 10.1126/science.286.5443.1347.

Jonas EA, Hickman JA, Hardwick JM, and Kaczmarek LK (2004) Exposure to hypoxia rapidly induces mitochondrial channel activity within a living synapse. J. Biol. Chem. doi: 10.1074/jbc.M410661200

Jonas EA et al (2004) Proapoptotic N-truncated BCL-xL protein activates endogenous mitochondrial channels in living synaptic terminals. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci.  doi: 10.1073/pnas.0401372101

Chen YB et al (2011) Bcl-xL regulates mitochondrial energetics by stabilizing the inner membrane potential. J. Cell Biol. doi: 10.1083/jcb.201108059

Hardwick JM, Chen Y and Jonas AE (2012) Multipolar functions of BCL-2 proteins link energetics to apoptosis. Trends Cell Biol. doi: 10.1016/j.tcb.2012.03.005

Alavian KN, et al (2014) An uncoupling channel within the c-subunit ring of the F1FO ATP synthase is the mitochondrial permeability transition pore. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A doi: 10.1073/pnas.1401591111

Kaczmarek LK, Zhang Y (2017) Kv3 channels: Enablers of rapid firing, neurotransmitter release, and neuronal endurance. Physiol Rev. doi: 10.1152/physrev.00002.2017.

Kulkarni M, Stolp ZD and Hardwick JM (2019) Targeting intrinsic cell death pathways to control fungal pathogens. Biochem. Pharmacol. doi: 10.1016/j.bcp.2019.01.012

Licznerski P et al (2020) ATP Synthase c-subunit leak causes aberrant cellular metabolism in Fragile X Syndrome. Cell, doi: 10.1016/j.cell.2020.07.008

WOODS HOLE, Mass. — For two people to communicate in a loud, crowded room, they need to be standing side by side. The same is often true for neurons in the brain. But the same way a cell phone allows two people to communicate clearly across the room, new research at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) opened up a new channel of communication in the worm C. elegans brain.

The research, published in Nature Communications, highlights the development of HySyn, a system designed to synthetically reconnect neural circuits using neuropeptides from Hydra, a small, freshwater organism. (Neuropeptides modulate the activity of neurotransmitters to increase or decrease the strength of impulses between neurons.)

For the first time, the researchers created genetic lines of mutant C. elegans that expressed neuropeptides from the Hydra brain, creating an artificial synapse that rewired a behavioral circuit in the worm. Because none of the other synapses in the brain, besides those fitted with the hydra receptor and neuropeptide, could hear the “command,” it was like giving them a cell phone so they could communicate.

C. elegans worms with green fluorescent protein (GFP) inserted into their neurons to visualize neural development. Photo Credit: Heiti Paves, Wikimedia Commons.

“These neuromodulatory peptides let you communicate at a distance,” said MBL Fellow Daniel Colón-Ramos of Yale University School of Medicine. “It gives you more flexibility as a researcher to manipulate neurons that are not adjacent to each other.”  Colón-Ramos, senior author on the paper, was postdoctoral advisor for the paper’s first author, former MBL Grass Fellow Josh Hawk. The work and analysis was performed at the MBL and at Yale University in Colón-Ramos’s lab.

The researchers used a mutant line of C. elegans that was missing the neural connection that controlled specific behavior — the behavior that told them that they were full and needed to stop searching for food. By taking genes that encode a neuropeptide and its receptor from Hydra and putting them into the C. elegans worm, researchers were able to restore the neural circuit that controls this behavior. They created two separate genetic lines—one that contained the neuropeptide and one that contained the receptor. The offspring of the pair contained the full neural peptide pathway. But, according to Hawk, it’s just one possible pathway to focus on.

“There are hundreds of neural peptides in Hydra, each of which could be a different channel of communication,” said Hawk. “To me, that’s the most exciting thing. This should open up a whole area that no one has ever explored before.”

Hawk called this study a “proof of principle” for the HySyn tool. Unlike most organisms, Hydra don’t have a classic neurotransmitter system in the brain. Instead, they rely completely on a net of neuropeptides. Each of these Hydra neuropeptides has the opportunity for a unique line of communication. Hawk focused on a particular neuropeptide that creates a slow-building signal, like the slow-building sensation of fullness as you eat a meal. Connecting different neurons with this neuropeptide could create a slowly rising pain response or strengthen a new memory.

Josh Hawk at the MBL as a Grass Foundation Fellow in 2019. Photo Credit: Melissa Coleman

There are many different types of communication in the brain. Some are fast, on the order of milliseconds. But others are slower. That’s what Hawk was focusing on, the slow neuromodulatory response that told the C. elegans: “I’m full, don’t go seek out new food.” The researchers created an artificial, neuromodulatory synapse that told the C. elegans it was time to relax.

“Usually, we can break things in science. That’s very powerful. When we break things we can see what they are necessary for, which also tells us a little about how they work. But to really understand how they work, you want to know if you can rebuild them—fix them—after they are broken. And that is very hard to do,” said Colón-Ramos. “That [Hawk] could rebuild the connections between cells was very exciting and innovative.”

Hawk wasn’t just putting back missing components in the C. elegans brain; he was putting in entirely new components from Hydra -- fixing what was broken with a different set of parts. It showed the researchers that it wasn’t necessarily the identity of the parts themselves, but the communication and modulation between the synapses that regulated the behavior.

Hawk said he hopes future research focuses on knocking out lines of communication in the brain and rebuilding them in a different way with HySyn.  “This is the beginning of a set of tools, and as those tools are expanded, it gives us a real ability to tweak connections in the brain in a variety of permutations,” he said.

Hydra are freshwater organisms, only a few millimeters in length. Here, muscle fibers are in sepia and the nerve net is in blue/green.
Credit: John Szymanski, Current Biology

“There’s a lot of diversity of synaptic connection in any animal’s brain. Being able to pick and choose what to put in another organism will help us untangle and understand how and why brains do what they do,” said Hawk.

The researchers are confident that HySyn will work in a variety of organisms. They tested it in vertebrate cells as well as in C. elegans.

Hawk added that he hopes researchers will focus on learning about the strength of connections within the brain. “In theory, can you tear down the worm brain and then rebuild it and find out what is lost when you rebuild it certain ways. It’s what we did as kids: If you want to know how something works, you break it down and rebuild it. But we need more tools to do that.” HySin  represents a contribution to that toolset.

In addition to his time as a Grass Fellow in 2019, Hawk was faculty member for the MBL’s Neural Systems and Behavior (NS&B) course from 2015-2019.

“Josh was able to leverage knowledge from the MBL and the people he met and put all that knowledge together, with his own interests in neuroscience, and make a significant contribution.  This is what programs like the Grass Fellowship and MBL help catalyze in science,” said Colón-Ramos.

“It’s like an emblematic MBL project,” Colon-Ramos said. “High risk, high reward. Lots of fun and bringing in a lot of knowledge from the MBL community.”

Citation:

Hawk, J.D., Wisdom, E.M., Sengupta, T. et al. (2021) A genetically encoded tool for reconstituting synthetic modulatory neurotransmission and reconnect neural circuits in vivo. Nature Communications, DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-24690-9

Homepage photo:

The C. elegans worm is a common model organism. Photo Credit: Zeynep F. Altun, Wikimedia Commons

Anne W. Sylvester

Sylvester comes to the MBL from the National Science Foundation (NSF) where, since 2014, she has been the Program Director and Cluster Leader of the Plant Genome Research Program, which supports genome-scale research that addresses challenging questions of biological, societal, and economic importance, and the Developmental Systems Cluster which supports research to understand the mechanisms and evolution of development.

As MBL Director of Research, Sylvester will develop and execute short and long-term strategic research plans that align with the laboratory’s overall institutional vision. Some of her key duties will include facilitating the success of resident and visiting research programs and research support services, identifying relevant funding opportunities, and coordinating collaborative research efforts between MBL scientists and University of Chicago faculty. Sylvester will oversee approximately 150 research staff.

“Anne brings extraordinary experience in academic research, public service, and federal oversight of science to this position,” said MBL Director Nipam Patel. “I am looking forward to working with her to advance MBL research in this important time of growth for the laboratory.”

Sylvester received a B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. in botany and developmental biology from the University of Washington. Prior to the NSF, she worked as an academic scientist, teacher, and administrator at the University of Wyoming and the University of Idaho. She held adjunct professor positions at both Cornell University’s School of Integrative Plant Science and in the Department of Molecular Biology at the University of Wyoming during her tenure at the NSF.

Sylvester succeeds David Mark Welch, who served as Interim Director of Research since 2017. He will continue to direct the MBL’s Josephine Bay Paul Center for Comparative Molecular Biology and Evolution and lead his own research program.

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The Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) is dedicated to scientific discovery – exploring fundamental biology, understanding marine biodiversity and the environment, and informing the human condition through research and education. Founded in Woods Hole, Massachusetts in 1888, the MBL is a private, nonprofit institution and an affiliate of the University of Chicago.

Contact: Diana Kenney, Marine Biological Laboratory
dkenney@mbl.edu; 508-685-3525

WOODS HOLE, Mass. -- A new Science and Technology Center, which the National Science Foundation (NSF) announced this week, will conduct transformative research, along with education and outreach, to promote a deeper understanding and appreciation of the chemicals and chemical processes that underpin ocean ecosystems.

The Center for Chemical Currencies of a Microbial Planet (C-CoMP), which will be based at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), is one of six centers that NSF announced on September 9. NSF has made an initial commitment for five years of support with the possibility of continued support for five additional years.

The Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL), Woods Hole, is one of 13 institutional partners in C-CoMP. MBL Fellow A. Murat Eren (Meren) of the University of Chicago is on C-CoMP’s executive committee.

At a time when increased carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are causing global temperatures to dramatically rise and make the ocean warmer and more acidic, C-CoMP will strive to bring rapid and transformative advances to understanding the behavior of bioreactive molecules and ocean microbes that are involved in one-quarter of the Earth’s annual organic carbon cycle.
 

A. Murat Eren (Meren) collects water samples to study surface ocean microbes. Meren, an MBL Fellow and faculty member at University of Chicago, is a co-principal investigator and an executive committee member for the new NSF Center for Chemical Currencies of a Microbial Planet (C-CoMP). Credit: Evan Barba/@Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

“NSF's Science and Technology Centers in ocean sciences have been beacons of scientific and technological leadership, and they have led to some of our deepest understandings of the critical role of the ocean in sustaining our planet,” said Richard Murray, WHOI’s deputy director and vice president for science and engineering. “This new center, led by WHOI and the University of Georgia, will undoubtedly have a big impact not only at these lead institutions and their partners, but throughout the scientific community, given the breadth of interdisciplinary study encompassing biology, chemistry, modeling, and informatics.”

“The MBL is excited to be part of C-CoMP and to participate in this critical research, which will extend our ongoing commitment to understanding the relationship between microbial communities, carbon cycling, and climate change,” said David Mark Welch, MBL’s Director of Research.

Gaining a better understanding of this carbon flux is important because so much of the carbon derived from photosynthesis on Earth is involved in a rapid cycle in which biologically reactive molecules are released into seawater and converted back into inorganic form by marine bacteria within a matter of hours to days. The central mechanism of this fast cycle is a chemical-microbe network, connecting the production, release, and consumption of dissolved molecules by surface ocean microbes. These chemical currencies can include growth substrates and vitamins that sustain mixed microbial communities that underpin the surface ocean ecosystem. However, the controls on this network, and its links to carbon sequestration in the deep ocean, are not known. Consequently, its sensitivities to changing ocean conditions are also unknown, and responses to future climate scenarios are not predictable.

“If we don’t know the resilience of this chemical-microbe network to a changing climate, we’re missing a pretty fundamental mechanism in the way the planet works,” said Elizabeth Kujawinski, a senior scientist in WHOI’s Marine Chemistry & Geochemistry Department, and the director of C-CoMP. “The overarching questions are what are the key molecules within this carbon pool, how quickly do they cycle, and what is the pool’s sensitivity to the changing climate. The ocean is already changing, and we don’t have time to wait to understand these fundamental questions.”
 

Preparing surface ocean samples using red light to not wake up microbes in night-time samples. Credit A. Murat Eren

“We can’t actually watch what ocean microbes are doing, because of their extremely small size. Yet, they are literally driving the major carbon and nutrient cycles that keep the planet alive. Better understanding of the network of microbes and chemicals will improve our ability to predict the way the ocean works, now and in the future” said Mary Ann Moran, Regents' Professor in the University of Georgia’s Department of Marine Sciences. Moran is C-CoMP’s co-director and research coordinator.

“An in-depth understanding of the chemical-microbe network has significant implications for our ability to keep a quantitative eye on our changing environments at resolutions that matter,” said co-principal investigator and MBL Fellow A. Murat Eren (Meren). “Yet, such an understanding also demands solutions to significant data analysis and integration challenges. We recognize these challenges and strive to work towards elegant solutions with our science community. With its commitment to open science and open data principles, C-CoMP will aim to foster community engagement and collaboration across disciplines and institutions.”

To tackle critical challenges, C-CoMP will leverage emerging tools and technologies, including advanced chemical tools to isolate and identify molecules produced by marine microbes, emerging molecular biology tools to link physiology to function across groups of microbes, and new informatics tools to leverage existing datasets of marine microbial and environmental parameters.

A major emphasis of the center will be working to expand ocean literacy among students of all ages and to broaden workforce diversity in the ocean sciences.

“I would like the center’s legacy to be a community of scientists and others who can support and advance this important work; a more diverse ocean science community; and a more collaborative approach to these questions that incorporates chemistry, biology, modeling, and other disciplines to better understand fundamental oceanographic mechanisms,” Kujawinski said.

C-CoMP’s participating institutions include WHOI, UGA and MBL as well as the University of Virginia, Columbia University, Bermuda Institute of Ocean Sciences, Stanford University, Boston College, Ohio State University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston University, the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, and the University of Florida.

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The Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) is dedicated to scientific discovery – exploring fundamental biology, understanding marine biodiversity and the environment, and informing the human condition through research and education. Founded in Woods Hole, Massachusetts in 1888, the MBL is a private, nonprofit institution and an affiliate of the University of Chicago.

As the Marine Biological Laboratory actively shapes a plan to protect its campus from coastal flooding -- the risk of which is climbing, inevitably, with global temperatures and sea-level rise –it will benefit from a new grant that enables the Woods Hole community to coordinate its resiliency efforts with the Town of Falmouth.

The grant, awarded to MBL’s neighbor, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), is one of 19 coastal resiliency projects the state of Massachusetts recently funded at a total of $4 million.

WHOI’s partners in the funded project are the MBL, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Northeast Fisheries Science Center in Woods Hole, and the Town of Falmouth.

“This grant funds the next phase of our planning, which is to take a wholistic view of coastal resiliency that ties the issues specific to our campuses with plans for the village of Woods Hole and the town of Falmouth,” says MBL Chief Operating Officer Paul Speer.

“We can’t exist as independent entities in this effort. We are all connected to town infrastructure – roadways, power, water, sewer lines – and we need to think about our neighbors as we try to start putting together long-term resiliency plans for our institutions,” Speer says.

The grant will allow the project partners to hire a contractor (The Woods Hole Group) to engage the local community, schools, businesses, and residents in a dialogue about coastal flooding risks; identify village flood pathways and vulnerabilities; and discuss long-term protective strategies.

A rainbow arcs over Eel Pond after a storm. Credit: Danielle Upton

Thinking Ahead

A few years ago, WHOI, MBL and NOAA commissioned a comprehensive report on their projected vulnerabilities to sea-level rise, storm-surge inundation, and other climate-change related impacts over the next decades. That report, prepared by the Woods Hole Group, was delivered in October 2020.

Its projections -- which align with probabilistic models of sea-level rise used by the state of Massachusetts -- were sobering. Using 2008 data as a baseline, it projected that relative sea level in Woods Hole will rise by 1.27 feet by 2030, by 2.57 feet by 2050, and by nearly 8 feet by 2100. The rise in sea level brings increasingly higher risk both of “sunny day” tidal flooding, as well as storm-surge inundation during rainstorms, nor’easters, and hurricanes.

The report modeled the probability of flooding in Woods Hole with very high level of resolution (down to 5-10 foot parcels), which enabled the institutions to identify what buildings and other infrastructural elements are most at risk of “critical elevation flooding” that would prevent them from functioning.

For MBL, the buildings identified as highest flood risk are clustered around Eel Pond: Lillie Laboratory, the Marine Resources Center, Swope Conference Center, and Candle House.

The report also proposed concepts and designs for the institutions to mitigate their flooding risk.

“Right now, we are in phase 2, which is looking in detail at some of the solutions proposed during phase 1,” says Speer. “We are figuring out what actions we can take in the near term to protect our buildings from flooding, as well as considering long-term solutions and what they may cost.” Speer expects that a set of recommendations on how the MBL should move forward will be available by late 2023.

“At the end of the day, our ultimate plan will have some combination of renovations to Lillie Laboratory and Swope, and engineering controls that give us the ability to prevent the flow of water from getting into particular buildings on campus,” Speer says.

Hurricane Ida makes landfall in Louisiana on August 29, 2021 before moving up the East Coast, where it caused major flooding in the New York City region before arriving, diminished, in New England. Credit: NASA

Added Protection

Currently, MBL prepares vulnerable buildings for potential storm surge by blocking doorways and entrances with plastic-wrapped boards and sandbags, but this is labor intensive. One possible alternative is erecting modular walls along the Eel Pond seawall and at other potential flood points.

Conceptual planning is underway for a renovation of Lillie Laboratory, where critical mechanical, electrical, and other building systems are in the basement, below the flood level. These building systems are also nearing obsolescence, so they need to be both replaced and moved to higher elevation. “We would also like to renovate the Crane wing of Lillie for our imaging activities. So Lillie has a complex set of interacting issues going on, one of which is the resilience factor,” Speer says.

Some of Swope’s building systems are also in the lower level, and Speer and MBL Facilities Director Marie Russell have started looking at conceptual designs for moving them up.

While Loeb Laboratory is not one of the highest-risk buildings for critical elevation flooding, it has important resources in the basement, including the National Xenopus Resource which can’t be moved, and the MBL IT Department’s Data Center.

“Our goal for the basement of Loeb is to protect it from flooding,” Speer says. “The majority of the building is on higher ground and it would take a truly stupendous flood to reach it, but there’s an area along MBL Street, including a building entrance, where water potentially could get in and flood the lower floor. We need to find a better solution to protect it.”

As work continues to solidify MBL’s resiliency plan, Speer looks forward to beginning the phase 3 process of coordinating with other entities in Woods Hole, which the new state grant will fund.

The Massachusetts Coastal Resilience grants are awarded through the Office of Coastal Zone Management within the Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs.

Homepage photo: Seawater splashes into MBL's Waterfront Park in Woods Hole during a storm.