Success is in his genes

DNR scientist's work with shellfish genetics wins honor

Bob Chapman lights up shellfish genes for a living. The cutting-edge science might become the key to keeping Lowcountry estuaries healthy.

The S.C. Department of Natural Resources marine scientist uses the new genetics field of human genomics, how genes mutate in response to stresses such as cancer, to study marine life forms and their environment. It's a complex, computer-driven evaluation of "micro arrays" of thousands of stimulations and responses in a single cell. Chapman likens it to reading expressions on a face.

The work is a way of gauging the health of marine environments by studying the individual "patient" rather than an entire ecosystem.

An offhand comment he made might sum it up the best: "If you build a house on the headwaters of a creek, the oyster knows it. He responds to it. He's different because of it."

When an animal is exposed to stresses such as contaminants, diseases or other environmental changes, different sequences of the genes are stimulated to respond. Reading those sequences can identify what's causing the stress and how serious it is. Potentially, it can anticipate what the stress will do to the organism.

A micro-arrayer, a machine that weighs a ton and costs about $100,000 per run, lights up those sequences in microscopic pinpricks of shellfish cells. The readouts can give environmental managers — in specifics as detailed as individual toxins — the information they need.

Chapman, 57, who works at the Hollings Marine Lab, just won recognition as a fellow with the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a peer-voted honor that puts him among the elite in his field.

He was studying what to do about a baffling virus depleting shrimp stocks when he found himself looking at a CD about the use of micro-arrayers in human medicine.

"All of a sudden the light bulb went off. I said, 'Here's the technology you can use when you don't know anything, and if it will work for shrimp, it will work for anything,' " he recalled. He and other researchers solved the virus dilemma, to a degree.

"It's a long story, but basically we have found a way to produce viral RNA in the lab, inject it into the shrimp to protect it from the virus," he said. That leaves the problem of how to get shrimp to line up for the vaccine. "That's the next leap, how to get it to the shrimp. That would be a major leap."

The gene work evolved to analyzing stresses on ecosystems. Today, Chapman runs a lab in the Hollings' multi-disciplined, open-door environment that alternately enthralls and aggravates him. Not surprisingly for a gene sequencer, he likes to keep his own order. But in that brainstorming approach, "you're looking at how science is going to be operating in the future," he said.

On a recent afternoon, College of Charleston graduate student researcher Jen Fountain catalogued striped bass DNA samples in what she teased is "the Chapman Lab," where the in-joke is to give the various machines names like "Calamity Jane" and the storage refrigerators and freezers are named for the seven dwarfs. No, the fellowship doesn't surprise her. "He's as good as he says he is," she said with a teasing smile. "He's one of the most brilliant people I've ever met."

Molly McElroy, the fellowship's association communications officer, called Chapman's fellowship validation from his peers.

Chapman shrugs. "There were only 12 in the state. Now there's 13, so, yeah, it's a good honor. I'm not sure what I did to deserve it," he said. A little later, asked about what motivates him about the work, he gives what he stresses is his personal opinion. "We have dedicated enormous resources to human health compared to, say, the collapse of the salt marshes," he said. "If the environment collapses we don't exist any more."

Reach Bo Petersen at bpetersen@postandcourier.com or 745-5852.