PRESQUE ISLE, Maine — From antibiotic resistance to Deboullie lichens, University of Maine Presque Isle professors are exploring a world of research while guiding a new generation of scientists.
In some parts of the north woods of Aroostook County, the rock structures in the modest mountains have not been surveyed since the 1970s. Now, partly because of recent archaeological finds in the region, a team led by UMPI geologist Chunzeng Wang is mapping the rocks in two areas with funding from the government’s geological survey.
“It’s our backyard: beautiful rocks with minerals,” Wang said during a recent lunchtime seminar open to the community. He’s one of several science professors at UMPI pursuing a range of research with students, often with a local focus with broader implications for understanding phenomena like antibiotic-resistant bacteria and climate change.
“Problem-solving is a big part of research,” biologist Larry Feinstein said. For UMPI science students, it’s a chance to participate in that problem solving — and get paid for doing work. “It’s a really interesting blend of analytical and technical but creative endeavors. You get to exercise both parts of your brain.”
In one such project, Feinstein and a team are investigating the “resistome,” the genetics of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, like the ones responsible for sometimes deadly infections.
The team has collected DNA samples of antibiotic-resistant microbes in humans from regional hospitals — where many of the antibiotic-resistant infections are first contracted — and from nearby agricultural and forest soils. They’re tracking “how genes transfer from the environment to pathogens” and whether antibiotic-resistant genes are migrating from microbes in the soil to humans, Feinstein said.
Depending on the extent of the soil’s influence or the local levels of interaction, the research may yield new ideas for preventing the spread of antibiotic resistance, which leads to the deaths of an estimated 23,000 Americans each year from such pathogens as Clostridium difficile and methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus.
Feinstein also is collaborating with UMPI biologist Scott Dobrin on other areas of bacteria and health.
“There are thousands and thousands of different species that are working with us in our body,” Dobrin said, referring to the human microbiome, our collection of microbes and their genes. For instance, he said, “we’re now understanding that the appendix is not a vestigial organ. When you get really sick and you flush your system out or you take antibiotics, the sack there is a place where you can have new bacteria recolonize your gut.”
To try to understand that complicated system in humans, Feinstein and Dobrin are focusing on the microbiome of honeybees, a simpler creature to study and also one struggling with colony collapse disorder, which is threatening some farmers who need the bees to pollinate crops.
With a smaller number of bacteria species in common and the ability to be dissected and analyzed under a microscope, honeybees and bumblebees can be used as a model organism to “pinpoint what’s going on,” Dobrin said. In the current project, they’re studying honeybees and bumblebees to find out whether environmental stressors, like pesticides, are contributing to colony collapse by interfering with bacteria.
“Bacteria is really important in honey,” Dobrin said. “If you disrupt those bacteria in their intestines, they’re not getting the nutrients out of the pollen that they really need.” And if they’re not getting enough nutrients, they may not be able to survive the winter.
Other UMPI professors are working with students on projects guaranteed to take them outside and potentially help improve understanding of the phenomena of climate change.
Last summer, UMPI archaeologist David Putnam traveled with students and a multiuniversity team to the Mongolian desert, where they took samples of mountain geology, tree rings and rock carvings — and did a little fly fishing.
“You have to be the right person to go to Mongolia. You have to not mind long hours in a truck pounding over dirt roads and living in tents,” Putnam said.
Among revelations from the ongoing project, the team has found that Mongolia’s grasslands are experiencing a drought “that is unprecedented” over the past 800 years, leading to an expanding desert over the same Asian grasslands that allowed Genghis Khan to expand the Mongol empire in the 1200s and with it world trade.
In northern Maine, where climate change may actually end up being beneficial by extending the growing season, UMPI researchers and students are focusing on a range of natural processes.
Biologist Judy Roe and researchers from Fort Kent have been tracking the ecology of Deboullie Public Reserved Land, an area of highland lakes, mountains, alpine plants, rock glaciers and ice caves. With some of its funding from the Maine lottery, the research has focused on the unique mosses, lichens and dwarf trees and ways they can be preserved amid a changing climate. “These are isolated communities,” Roe said.
Wang, UMPI’s geographic information systems specialist, Feinstein and others are working on a project with the Aroostook Band of Micmacs to study the carbon cycle in the tribe’s forestlands on the former Loring Air Force base. Depending on the results, the Micmacs could harvest some of the trees and sell them, or they could manage the forest as a carbon sink, to sell carbon credits to companies offsetting their carbon dioxide pollution.
Elsewhere in Aroostook County’s forests, UMPI biologist Jason Johnston and students are learning about the movements of birds, trees and insects.
“We are this place where there is a mix,” Johnston said. Northern Maine is in a forest transition zone where oaks are in their northern reaches, while spruce and maple are at the south of their range and receding north because of a changing climate.
“Birds are also moving,” Johnston said.
Among others, the boreal chickadee may be leaving and heading north. With a range that extends only as far south as central Maine, they are rare sights in Aroostook County, preferring black spruce forests that are estimated to be migrating north as the climate warms. The northern cardinal, meanwhile, has been gradually expanding into upper New England since at least the 1960s, when its range went only as far north as Connecticut.
Today, the northern cardinal is comfortable in northern Maine, among other birds like the woodthrush that are advancing north amid warmer springs and falls.
“It’s not totally well-known why they made that expansion,” Johnston said.
With a National Science Foundation grant, Johnston and a team are trying to figure out whether the birds’ trends are driven by their food sources shifting north or because of timing — warmer springs and falls that are shifting seasonal beginnings and endings, and the availability of insects. “The birds may be getting there either too early or too late for when they’ve evolved to show up here.”
“I’ve had students who’ve worked with me in the past,” Johnston said, mentioning a past student who now works in bone science at Yale University. “Nothing related to this, but I think the experience helped her get there,” he said. “Currently, we just got started on DNA barcoding and starting in the spring, I’ll need someone to help me catch birds, do GIS and do some of the field work.”
Those kinds of projects can be a win-win for faculty and students, Johnson said. “It’s what we’re all trying to do: advance our research and provide opportunities.”