The Gloucester Marine Genomics Institute (GMGI) recently received a $2.25 million grant from the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center which will be used to grow one of its core technologies and services into something few others in the country offer.
GMGI is one of five institutions across the state to receive a portion of the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center’s new Testing and Demonstrations Assets program’s $18 million grant funding. The money is the first issued under the Mass Leads Act, a 2025 bill dedicated to economic development.
The Gloucester-based nonprofit will use the money to expand one of its core focus areas, environmental DNA, or eDNA for short, as it works to address oceanic and environmental challenges and conduct research into human health.
GMGI Research Program Director Ann Petersen said eDNA — genetic material shed by organisms into their environment — is used by researchers across the world. GMGI uses it to assess ocean health and what kinds of organisms are living or passing through water by analyzing the DNA found in water samples.
“I could take a scoop of water, filter it, then use modern sequencing to look at every single living thing that was within a one-mile radius within the last 24 hours,” Petersen said.
She explained eDNA work is nothing new to GMGI — its researchers have been utilizing it in various capacities for the better part of 10 years and the institution has become a known leader in eDNA.
“There are probably less than five eDNA commercial service platforms and this will certainly be the first in Massachusetts,” she said.
Looking at the harbor
The grant money is going to be used to expand GMGI’s eDNA work by building technology, creating a commercial service for other researchers to utilize the technology, creating public harbor condition stations for people to learn about everything in Gloucester waters, and train and educate people on climate technology and the ocean.
The commercial service will analyze water samples from other organizations that do not have the technology to do it themselves while the harbor condition stations will include data GMGI collects such as what species are in the water and ocean conditions such as temperature, salinity and pH.
The money also will be used to create a “maker space,” a collaborative area at the GMGI facility downtown for startup companies to utilize, and an eDNA module to teach Gloucester Biotechnology Academy students how to use the technology.
“I think the state sees us as a very important North Shore innovation anchor and that’s why they’re investing in us from a construction standpoint to invest in capital equipment to be able to do this,” said GMGI Executive Director Bonnie Fendrock.
While the core uses of the money, according to Petersen, is economic development to help GMGI build the technology and grow the business, the investment has several possible scientific impacts.
Eyeing fish migration
One potential impact Petersen highlighted is mapping migration patterns of different species in the consistently warming Gulf of Maine. She said with the technology, GMGI could help commercial fishermen understand where the fish are coming from and where they are going.
“Our climate and oceans are warming and changing and this gives people that rely on the sea a whole new tool to be able to understand what’s happening that was never visible,” she said.
Petersen said there is the potential to incorporate artificial intelligence into the technology as well.
“We are interested in developing an A.I.-based tool that can be predictive based on eDNA and ocean conditions as to where fish and other important marine mammals may or may not be,” Petersen said. “This type of data could help with avoiding boat collisions or understanding where whales really are at certain times of year and how those patterns change.”
Another scientific impact that could potentially come out of the grant funding has to do with improvements to eDNA technology as a whole.
Petersen said eDNA is a far less disruptive monitoring method to an ecosystem than traditional trawling but right now it cannot collect the number of each species like trawling can.
“I can tell you cod is there, but I can’t tell you how many,” Petersen said. “People are working around the world to make it quantitative so that’s something not necessarily written into this grant but it’s something that could come out of it.”
The information collected through eDNA can also be used in marine construction projects, such as off-shore wind turbines, because the data collected can show the environmental impact of the projects over time.
Staff Writer Bobby Grady may be contacted at 978-675-2714 or bgrady@gloucestertimes.com.