GESTAR II Seminar Series, Tuesday, August 25th at 1:00pm

Join us for a hybrid seminar by Daniella Asturias, Researcher at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Her talk is titled "Linking PACE Hyperspectral Ocean Color with Underway Metaproteomics Across a Northwest Atlantic Transect." 

Date and Time: Tuesday, August 25, 2026 at 1:00pm EST
Physical Location: NASA GSFC, Building 33, Room E108
Online: Join us via Teams.  

Abstract:
"Phytoplankton community composition shapes marine biogeochemistry, yet satellite-derived community retrievals are rarely validated against molecular-scale measurements of the organisms themselves. We paired continuous underway metaproteomics with collocated NASA PACE hyperspectral ocean color retrievals along a March 2025 transect from Bermuda to Woods Hole, spanning the Sargasso Sea, Gulf Stream, and New England shelf-slope system. Proteomic samples were resolved into taxon-specific community fractions and compared against PACE MOANA picophytoplankton retrievals for Prochlorococcus, Synechococcus, and picoeukaryotes. This proof-of-concept study asks a question: do proteomic and satellite-derived community fractions agree, and where does that agreement hold or break down? Picoeukaryote fractions show the most robust concordance with MOANA (Spearman ρ = 0.84 pooled across the transect, ρ = 0.56 within individual provinces, p < 0.01). Prochlorococcus shows strong pooled agreement (ρ = 0.89) that is driven substantially by a cross-province thermal gradient rather than within-province covariation, while Synechococcus concordance is currently limited by incomplete cyanobacterial taxonomic annotation. Together, these results demonstrate a practical, reproducible pathway for validating PACE-derived phytoplankton community composition against direct molecular measurements, and lay the groundwork for extending this comparison to nutrient-stress biomarkers and additional cruises."

Biography:
Daniella Asturias is a researcher in the Saito Lab at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, who is currently completing a summer internship in the Ocean Ecology Laboratory (Code 616) at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. She will begin a doctoral program at UC Santa Cruz this September. Her work combines ocean metaproteomics with satellite remote sensing to study phytoplankton community structure. 

For more information on the GESTAR II Seminar Series, click here.