‘Little Brown Balls’ rewrite history

You never know what you’ll find in Sydney Harbour! A team of Australian and international researchers came across an unknown small creature in the harbour that re-writes our understanding of the history of life.

A member of the team, Dr Kirsten Heimann from James Cook University said that the organism, now dubbed Chromera velia, looks like a little brown ball but packs a punch in terms of scientific implications.

Firstly, it is related both to dinoflagellates — the types of tiny marine organisms that can produce harmful toxins but also are vital for coral health — and to the parasite that causes malaria!

Secondly, it is so different from either dinoflagellates or malaria parasites that the researchers have had to create a new category of life for it.

Thirdly, it demonstrates how little is actually known about what lives in our waters, even in such a well-studied place as Sydney Harbour.

Patrick J Keeling from the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research described the discovery, which was published in Nature magazine, as a development that is full of promise.

“It illuminates a dark corner in the evolution of photosynthesis, and further insights are to come,” Dr Keeling wrote in the same edition of the prestigious magazine.

These startling findings will create international interest in little brown balls that are abundant in the oceans. For one thing, Chromera is easy to grow in a mixture of chemicals (like garden fertiliser), which means that lots of brown balls can be produced.

This cannot be done so easily with malaria parasites. So, if Chromera is biologically similar to malaria, it can be used as a test organism to evaluate effectiveness of new anti-malarial drugs.

Dr Kirsten Heimann who is the Director of the North Queensland Algal Indentification/Culturing Facility (NQAIF) at JCU maintains the original culture of Chromera. Bob Moore, a member of the team from University of Sydney, isolated and cultured the organism also from waters of the Great Barrier Reef. This shows that the new critter has a potentially huge temperature tolerance.

Spurred on by the lack of knowledge of what lives in Australian waters, and especially small creatures that underpin ecology of regions such as the Great Barrier Reef, Dr Heimann and JCU geneticist Professor David Blair now intend to start developing a new research program investigating the tiny organisms found in these waters.

They will use both high-tech DNA methods and traditional ways to look for unknown organisms and work out how these can be distinguished from better-known organisms.

“This will help us recognise when new organisms make their way into our waters, allowing us to evaluate their ecological impact on the Great Barrier Reef,” Dr Heimann said.

For more information contact Jo Meehan, JCU Media, on 4781 4586 or 0422 543 757

Kirsten Heimann on 4781 5795 or David Blair on 4322