Dr Leonie Suter – genetics researcher

Scientists of the Antarctic: Dr Leonie Suter

Video transcript

As a geneticist I obviously work with DNA… I think everybody knows that DNA is the genetic information that we have in every different cell of our body and basically defines what we are.

Animals have DNA, plants have DNA, pretty much all organisms have DNA. At the moment I specifically work with environmental DNA… and that’s the DNA that’s shed by all organisms into the environment they live in.

So a fish may shed a scale or obviously do his business in the ocean.

It might die, it might be decaying, dead, tissue floating around slowly, dispersing. Basically the same for all the organisms living in the marine environment and there’s a lot of microscopic organisms as well – and that all sort of forms a sort of soup of DNA – and if we just take a litre or two of seawater and analyse that genetically we can, without actually having seen any of the animals that actually live there, we can determine what exactly lives in that environment with genetic methods.

I’ve actually moved from fundamental research where you’re just trying to work out how something works fundamentally without a really applied outcome to a much more applied field, and I think that’s just really exciting when you can see the work you’re doing can have a real impact.

For example we’re currently working on developing eDNA markers, genetic markers, that are very specific to Antarctic krill, and we’re hoping this will help to estimate the abundance and distribution of Antarctic krill in the Southern Ocean and if it all works this will all correctly inform the fisheries of Antarctic krill, the management of the fisheries. So it’s a pretty short link to actually having an impact and that’s really exciting and motivating too, to actually do a good job (smiles).

[end transcript]

Dr Leonie Suter, BSc, MSc, PhD

Research interests

I first started working at the Australian Antarctic Division in 2015 on an early postdoc mobility fellowship from the Swiss National Science Foundation, to study the molecular sex determination of Antarctic krill. After a couple of maternity breaks I’m now investigating how environmental DNA (eDNA) can be used to survey the marine environment. All living things continuously shed parts of their bodies into the environment – for marine organisms, this may include scales, moults, faeces, or other dead and decaying tissues, as well as live microscopic organisms. All this organic matter contains the unique DNA code of the organism it belongs to and in the marine environment, this “environmental DNA” gets thoroughly mixed to form a soup of genetic information. We can access this information by taking a small water sample and processing it with genetic and bioinformatics methods, and this way we can determine which organisms live in the marine environment without having directly encountered any of them. This exciting new research focus helps us to determine how species distributions and community compositions change through geographic space and time.

Before I started working at the Australian Antarctic Division, I focused my research on plants: I conducted my master thesis on the sex chromosome evolution of a tree species at the fabulous Kew Gardens in the UK - and my PhD on the role of epigenetics in adaptation to harsh environments in Arabidopsis (an inconspicuous little weed) at the ETH Zurich in Switzerland. Feeling adventurous, I spent the next two years sailing on a small yacht from the high Arctic (Svalbard, Greenland) to the Caribbean, exploring the effects of a changing environment on the marine life and coastal communities, managing a Chimpanzee Rehabilitation Project in West Africa, and discovering my love for all things wild and marine, which doesn’t necessarily come natural to someone from land-locked Switzerland!

Current projects

#4556: Shaping the future use of environmental DNA (eDNA) in Southern Ocean ecosystem monitoring

Collaborations & representations

CSIRO
University of Tasmania
University of Western Australia
British Antarctic Survey (UK)
University of Padua (Italy)
ETH Zurich (Switzerland)

Key outcome areas

Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR)

Publications

Clarke LJ, Suter L, Deagle BE, Polanowski AM, Terauds A, Johnstone GJ, Stark JS (2021) Environmental DNA metabarcoding for monitoring metazoan biodiversity in Antarctic nearshore ecosystems. PeerJ 9: e12458

Suter L, Polanowski AM, Clarke LJ, Kitchener JA, Deagle BE (2021) Capturing open ocean biodiversity: comparing environmental DNA metabarcoding to the continuous plankton recorder. Molecular Ecology 30(13): 3140-3157

Clarke LJ, Suter L, King R, Bissett A, Bestley S, Deagle BE (2021) Bacterial epibiont communities of panmictic Antarctic krill are spatially structured. Molecular Ecology 30(4): 1042-1052

Suter L, Polanowski AM, King R, Romualdi C, Sales G, Kawaguchi S, Jarman SN, Deagle BE (2019) Sex identification from distinctive gene expression patterns in Antarctic krill (Euphausia superba). Polar Biology 42(12): 2205-2217.

Clarke LJ, Suter L, King R, Bissett A, Deagle BE (2019) Antarctic krill are reservoirs for distinct Southern Ocean microbial communities. Frontiers in Microbiology 15: 9:3226.

Guggisberg A, Liu X, Suter L, Mansion G, Fischer MC, Fior S, Roumet M, Kretzschmar R, Koch MA, Widmer A (2018) The genomic basis of adaptation to calcareous and siliceous soils in Arabidopsis lyrata. Molecular Ecology 27(24):5088-103.

Suter L, Rüegg M, Zemp N, Hennig L and Widmer A (2014) Gene regulatory variation mediates flowering responses to vernalization along an altitudinal gradient in Arabidopsis. Plant Physiology 166(4):1928-1942

Rahmé J, Suter L, Widmer A, Karrenberg S (2014) Inheritance and reproductive consequences of floral anthocyanin deficiency in Silene dioica (Caryophyllaceae). American Journal of Botany 101(8):1388-92.

Suter L and Widmer A (2013) Environmental heat and salt stress induce transgenerational phenotypic changes in Arabidopsis thaliana. PloS One, 8(4): e60364

Suter L and Widmer A (2013) Phenotypic effects of salt and heat stress over three generations in Arabidopsis thaliana. PloS One, 8(11): e80819

See more of Dr Suter's publications on Google Scholar or ORCID.

This content was last updated 2 years ago on 13 May 2022.