The Western Basin of Lake Erie experiences cyanobacterial harmful algal blooms (cyanoHABs) every year between May through October. These events produce mass amounts of toxic cyanobacterial mass, threatening both human and environmental health. We began working with NOAA Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory (GLERL) and the Cooperative Institute for Great Lakes Research (CIGLR) to sample Western Lake Erie during pre-bloom, bloom, and post-bloom conditions for genomic, metabolomic, and physiochemical data.

In the Geomicrobiology laboratory, we utilize high throughput, multi-omic techniques to identify the organisms, genes and their transcript levels, and toxic metabolites produced within each collected sample. By collecting these powerful datasets over a spatiotemporally resolved time series that represents seasonal and interannual variation, we hope to better understand how and why cyanoHABs in the Great Lakes are changing. These data are bioinformatically computed and deposited in the Great Lakes Atlas for Multi-Omics Research (GLAMR), along with all other publicly available multi-omic data sets from the Great Lakes.