Spotlight: Adrian
Adrian Munguia-Vega interviewed by JJ Ramberg
From your first conversation with Adrian, his love for the species that live in the ocean is unmistakable. He’s dedicated his life to understanding how to utilize molecular tools in ways to conserve, manage, and describe biodiversity, and on the NewAtlantis team, his insights, and depth of experience are invaluable. We are grateful to be working alongside him and were excited to hear the story of his passion for the ocean.
With more than 20 years of experience, your CV reads like a small novel but there is a throughline — all of your work uses the application of genetic and genomic tools to understand, manage and conserve biodiversity. Where did your initial interest in this field come from?
I have been fascinated by biodiversity and science since I was a kid growing up in Mexico City I collected insects and watched them go through metamorphosis and eat each other in my living room. It was until high school that I understood how DNA connects all living things and that captured my interest for life. I figured that if I understood what DNA is and how it works, then that will open a window to learn secrets from any animal or plant I could think of. Later I was able to move to La Paz city in Baja California Peninsula where I started studying marine biology in college from there I have dedicated my career to scientific research based on DNA and to exploring ocean biodiversity underwater with any tool or opportunity that crosses my path.
For people who are new to this kind of work, can you please explain what genetic and genomic tools are and how they are used to promote biodiversity?
Deep within each cell of any living organism, you could think of, there are generally billions of bits of information contained within DNA that have been passed through generations and that code for any protein, enzyme, or biological molecule that we need to live. There are also tons of repetitive DNA of many types that we are not completely sure what they do. A genomic tool is any given segment of DNA within a species that we can analyze and obtain information from, usually by reading the DNA sequence of that particular segment to obtain what looks like a string of text with 4 bases (A, T, G, C) in an infinite number of combinations and lengths. Because this genetic information has been passed through evolving species since the beginning of life on earth and through countless generations, it contains a lot of information about the process itself and the species, populations, and individuals involved in such processes, a blockchain of unique information if you will. By looking into different parts of the DNA, we might be able to identify what species are present in a sample of water collected from the deep ocean without seeing them, so we can uncover animals and plants that are not in our radars and hotspots of biodiversity that need protection from human impacts. We could look at a different DNA part and obtain information about when a species originated, which its closest relatives were, or what was the size of its population at the peak of the last glacial period 20,000 years ago or before hunting or fishing reduced their numbers over the last decades. Going to other parts of the DNA we could tell how far and from where a fish larvae traveled with the ocean currents before settling in a reef and being captured by a small-scale fisher, so we can understand where marine reserves could be more effective at promoting fisheries. We could go to your favorite fish restaurant, look at the DNA of the fish on your plate, and tell if you are inadvertently consuming an endangered species of shark and where it came from. Or we could look at the entire genetic information of a species that is being affected by climate change and figure out what environmental factors are driving its collapse and identify genetic variants that provide an advantage in the new climate conditions. The questions and applications are endless.
How has your work changed since you entered the field?
Genomics is a field where technology has improved dramatically over the last 20 years. When I started I had to sequence a single DNA segment at a time, and the difference now is that we can sequence millions of DNA segments simultaneously. This has increased the resolution, speed, and amount of information available to us. For example, we can now recover individual DNA molecules floating in the water and sequence them to reveal thousands of species that we have not ever seen or studied, or sequence the entire genome of a species and obtain information about every biological process that is needed for their survival and every aspect of their life cycle that has an impact on the place where it lives related to the transfer of nutrients for example.
What is the most exciting thing you’ve worked on to date?
Seeing the transformation brought about by massive parallel sequencing to understand the true dimension of marine biodiversity is perhaps the most exciting. In my lab, we have implemented new ways to detect marine species around the Gulf of California, Mexico, by filtering seawater, recovering floating DNA molecules, and sequencing them. We showed we can increase 10X-50X the number of fish and marine animals and algae detected at shallow reefs (< 30 m) compared to scuba surveys, detecting more species in a few liters of water than all the historical records together. At reefs that barely receive any sunlight (~120 m), we discovered populations of commercial and endangered fish and invertebrates that are protected there from fishing on the surface. Then we analyzed samples over 1 km deep and discovered some sites that have even more marine biodiversity than the richest shallow sites that we know. We have now new toys and tools to see the life that inhabits all the places we have missed and to understand what roles they play there, all the way to the bottom of the ocean. The deep sea is the ultimate frontier on our planet and we are just starting to explore the diversity of life there.
What are the biggest challenges you face to do the work you have dedicated your life to?
I can think of many challenges. Transfer of technology and information into developing countries like Mexico has a 10-year lag and 2X increase in price, compared to the developed world where most of the scientific innovation is being produced, yet the core of biodiversity lies within developing countries. Filling that gap takes a good amount of my time and brain power in terms of building local capacities, leveraging funding, and helping to transfer knowledge and technology while trying to make the research relevant in the short and long term within a complex socio-ecological reality.
What is the biggest problem you would like to solve? What gets you excited?
I am excited about our increasing ability to measure the complexity of marine biodiversity in all its dimensions, including the diversity of species present, their interactions and temporal dynamics, and the roles they play in their ecosystems, and use this information to show how our present and future as a society are directly linked to marine biodiversity and the services that species and ecosystems provide to us. Too often we do not think about how the air we breathe, the food we eat, the temperature we live in or the latest technological or medical innovations are ecosystem services provided by natural habitats and the biodiversity they sustain. My goal is to find ways to keep biodiversity functional in providing its services to humanity.
In your public bio, you say that you are trying to “redefine the role of scientists in society.” What do you mean by that?
In my professional career, I try every day to change several paradigms related to the scientific endeavor. Too often we perceived scientists as removed from society, asking their questions about the universe from within their ivory towers, speaking in complex technical language mostly to other scientists and funded by large federal organizations. At the end of my Ph.D., I had to choose between following the traditional path of joining an academic research institution and becoming a traditional university professor or starting my own private research lab in Mexico and creating a new path where the destination was not in sight. Ten years later after that decision, I still do not know what the end looks like, but I have enjoyed every turn of the journey. From the position of an independent research lab, I had to start co-creating relevant scientific questions along with the ultimate users of the scientific information, either local fishing communities, civil society organizations, government agencies, or private companies. I soon realized that the best way to know what the relevant questions are is to be outside the lab, commonly in the field or underwater, where things are happening and so field research is an integral part of my work. In most of my projects, the genomic information gathered goes to answer a specific applied research question that is developed and often funded by the user of that information, and while I still have some flexibility to explore new questions on my own or by participating in traditional research projects funded by large federal organizations, the applications of my research to the people around me are always at the front on my mind. My network of clients and collaborators is diverse and large, and I had to learn to communicate effectively with them in plain terms and to understand their needs and limitations.
You have been involved in the creation of Marine Protected Areas. Tell us about the work you have done there.
Marine protected areas (MPA) are one of the best tools we have to ensure that all dimensions of biodiversity (from genes to species and ecosystems) continue to provide us with the key services we need to sustain our existence as a society. Along with a terrific group of collaborators, we have been focusing on developing MPA design principles that increase their ecological and social effectiveness. For example, I have used genomic information to validate oceanographic models to describe complex patterns of larval dispersal driven by ocean currents in various commercial species of fish and invertebrates. This information has been used then to identify key larval sources where the limited resources often available for MPA implementation could give the largest returns in terms of improving local fisheries outside of the MPA polygons. Another example is using genomic information to identify fishing communities that exchange larvae and adult fish via dispersal but that might not talk to each other or even think of collaborating in establishing a new MPA that could benefit all of them given the ecological links present between their fishing zones. By recovering floating DNA molecules and sequencing them my work with environmental DNA is helping to identify biodiversity hotspots or sites with exceptional levels of biodiversity that are good candidates for establishing new MPAs, both from coastal zones and the deep sea. Another application has been establishing marine ecological baselines within MPAs to help measure changes in species presence or abundance driven by anthropogenic activities such as fishing, tourism, or the geographic and bathymetric redistribution of species due to climate change.
You just got back from a sampling mission to one of Mexico’s most remote islands. How incredibly exciting. What did you see? What did you learn? It must have been mission-affirming for you to see what can happen when the ocean is left alone.
I got the opportunity to participate in a research expedition to Revillagigedo National Park in the Eastern Tropical Pacific of Mexico organized by the National Commission of Protected Areas (CONANP) to help develop a baseline of all the marine present within the park using genomic tools such as environmental DNA from shallow and deep water samples. These islands have been formed by submarine volcanoes that, when emerged, created a large amount of habitat surrounded by deep oceanic waters. Because of their isolation and the establishment of a biosphere reserve a few decades ago and more recently the expansion of the fully-protected polygon, the impact of fishing, particularly industrial fishing, has been significantly reduced. The result is a pristine marine ecosystem with a full suite of marine top predators that reminds us how marine food webs used to be before we impacted most of the ocean that is within our reach. It is thrilling to see large sharks over there in every dive and think that we have extirpated them from most of the ocean elsewhere. For me, is an opportunity to see what an intact marine food web looks like and to understand what things we have missed elsewhere, or what services we might be able to regain if we let nature recover in some places so that we keep collecting its benefits in others.
What was it about the work NewAtlantis Labs is doing that inspired you to join the team?
Finding a group of super-motivated individuals that are trying to use the latest technological innovations in metabarcoding, metagenomics, metatranscriptomics, and bioinformatics to understand and value marine biodiversity has been very refreshing. I think that if we are going to keep the ecosystem services that the ocean provides to us, we need to develop state-of-the-art methods to measure key relevant functional aspects of that biodiversity and devise mechanistic models of how the distinct elements of the ecosystem work together and how their services to us are sustained within this complex system. The design of novel financial models that allow us to keep those ecosystem services running while re-investing in the local communities that protect them is the holy grail that many of us are searching for in the long term, and there I found an alignment with NewAtlantis.
What are you working on currently at NewAtlantis?
We are trying new methods to reconstruct and visualize large marine food webs from co-occurrence data based on environmental DNA metabarcoding datasets that my lab has been generating from the Gulf of California, a place we know relatively well and where we have many independent sources of information that can help us understand how these new methods work in the context of what is already known. We are also developing ways to visualize the information and to assign species or groups of species to functional entities or classifications that capture their role in the ecosystem, either from the literature or the omics data itself. For example, their trophic relationships up and down the food web, or their role in nutrient cycling, taking into consideration many challenges and limitations that include taxonomic complexity and uncertainty, and lack of ecological and genetic information for many species, among many others. Finally, we are also interested in developing analyses and metrics that can help us to summarize marine ecosystem structure and capture key ecosystem functions from the omics datasets in places with different levels of anthropogenic impact.
Check Adrian out on Twitter or more of his extensive research here.
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