Posted 10/22/2008

Dr. Alan Decho was keynote speaker at international
symposium on Stromatolites

Arnold School researcher Dr. Alan Decho was a keynote speaker at an international symposium dedicated to the study of one of the world’s oldest organic structures – stromatolites.

Alan Decho

The academics assembled at the University of Göttingen where Decho spoke on An Emerging Framework for Understanding Marine Stromatolite Formation.

“Stromatolites are a sensitive environmental dipstick and the ultimate platform from which to study bacterial communication and coordination of activities; processes that play key roles in both the environment and disease,” Decho said.

Stromatolites are the earth’s earliest microbial communities, having persisted for over 3.5 billion years, according to Decho, a professor in the Department of Environmental Health Sciences.

Decho also is director of the department’s Microbial Interactions Laboratory at the Public Health Research Center.

The lab is involved in microbial studies in Columbia and at Highborne Cay, a remote subtropical island in the Bahamas where stromatolites grow on the ocean floor.

The stromatolites in the Bahamian waters are rocklike structures formed by layered deposits of calcium carbonate. The layers are created by biofilms of microscopic organisms.

Scientists from 18 nations gathered for the weeklong International Kalkowsky-Symposium on the Geobiology of Stromatolites in the German city of Göttingen.

The conference was organized to share scientific knowledge and to celebrate the centennial of the term "stromatolith," coined by German researcher Ernst Kalkowsky in 1908.

The University at Göttingen has long been one of Germany’s best, with 42 Nobel laureates having conducted their research there.

For more information on marine stromatolites, visit the Research Initiative on Bahamian Stromatolites website: http://www.stromatolites.info/.