Eleanor Arrington

Research

My research focuses on the bacterial consumption of water-soluble hydrocarbons from natural and anthropogenic oil sources. This work builds on recent findings from heavily studied marine oil spills such as the Refugio pipeline breach and the Deepwater Horizon blowout, and capitalizes on access to natural seep systems offshore California and in the Gulf of Mexico as model systems when there are no spills to study. We utilize submarines and other submersible tools to find oil seeps and use them as natural laboratories to study microbes that utilize oil as a source of carbon and energy. I am specifically interested in which microbes respond to water-soluble hydrocarbons (an understudied class of compounds in petroleum), and the metabolic strategies they employ to consume these compounds in unique environments, such as the deep ocean.