Philip Butterworth

BSc (Hons), MSc, AIBMS
PhD Student

Contact Details: Phone: + 61 2 9850 Fax: + 61 2 9850 8248 Email: pbutterw@els.mq.edu.au

Research Area: Microbial Ecology of Sulfur Rich Hydrothermal Systems.

Originally from Lancashire, England I spent my early adult years traveling around the UK working in various jobs (textile mill worker, bank clerk and bouncer, amongst others) before landing a job in a public health laboratory at a hospital in Portsmouth. I was fortunate to be offered sponsorship from the laboratory to study, as a mature student, for an undergraduate degree in Biomedical Science. I am the first member of my family to go to university and this opportunity was the beginning of the realisation of a long held ambition to study astrobiology, an ambition that began with my reading the books of Carl Sagan. I obtained my degree and the year prize for the best student and worked for another year as a Biomedical Scientist before successfully applying for a scholarship to study for an MSc in Biological Research Methods at the University of Exeter. My Masters degree was intended to be a stepping stone towards a PhD in astrobiology and I began to investigate PhD opportunities overseas in the warmer climes of the southern hemisphere. I arrived in Australia in September 2002 to take up an international scholarship from Macquarie University (iMURS) to study for my PhD at the Australian Centre for Astrobiology (ACA).

The main thrust of my research involves an investigation of the microbial ecology of the sulfur rich hydrothermal system of White Island, New Zealand's most active volcano. This work is intended to help us better understand how the extremophilic microbes present within this system interact with each other and their environment. The genes, and their expression products, involved in driving biogeochemical cycles within such systems, as well as those involved in geomicrobiological processes, such as mineral formation, are a key focus of this research. My PhD is supervised by Professor Malcolm Walter and Dr Roberto Anitori.

The initial stage of this research involved fieldwork on White Island (July 2003). Twenty samples were collected from areas with a range of temperatures (36°C to 104°C) and acidity (pH 0.0 to 3.4) and water samples were collected for geochemical analysis. Samples were initially processed at the University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand (a member institution of the Australian Centre for Astrobiology (ACA)). Numerous extremophilic species have so far been identified, including various Archaea. This is the first report of this domain of life on White Island (Butterworth 2004). A second field trip was recently carried out (February 2005) in which further terrestrial samples were collected as well as samples from shallow submerged vent sites around the island. This field work was carried out in collaboration with Institute of Geological & Nuclear Sciences (IGNS) in New Zealand.

In addition to studying the terrestrial and shallow vent systems of White Island I have been involved in a project concerning microbial communities living on and within deep ocean hydrothermal vent systems. As an associate member of NASA's Astrobiology Institute, the ACA has ongoing involvement in NASA's Oceanographic Analogue Mission Activity (NOAMA). This project involves the study of rare and precious samples collected from hydrothermal vents at the bottom of the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans. The collection of these samples was a collaborative undertaking involving the movie director James Cameron and a number of research institutes including the ACA. My initial project involvement included work at James Cameron's production studios in Los Angeles to edit film footage of deep ocean hydrothermal systems for scientific content. This footage will be used to assist in the analysis of the samples collected from the mission. I then traveled to the Johnson Space Centre, Houston to catalogue the samples from the mission. I carried out further work on the samples at a laboratory specializing in culturing anaerobic thermophiles and hyperthermophiles at the University of Georgia, Athens, before returning to the ACA with geological and microbiological samples from the mission. My involvement in this project continues through the ACA's ongoing analysis of the microbiological samples collected.

Publications:

Journal Articles
Butterworth, P. 2004. White Island: A sulfur-rich hydrothermal system. Microbiology Australia, 25: 28-29.

Conference Proceedings
Butterworth P. 2004. White Island: The microbial ecology of a sulfur rich hydrothermal system. Australian Society for Microbiology Annual Scientific Conference, 26 September - 1 October 2004

 

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Last Updated: Jan 30 2006