My Creator, today grant me the wisdom to seek Your wisdom. Help me to Walk of the Red Road.

Key Found to the Smell of the Sea

Andrea Thompson
LiveScience Staff Writer
LiveScience.com Fri Feb 2, 12:40 PM ET

A trip to the beach means sand between your toes, salt water in your mouth and that aromatic sea air in your nose. But what gives the ocean air that delightful and distinctive smell? Scientists have not known the full story until now.

The smell comes from a gas produced by genes recently identified by researchers in ocean-dwelling bacteria.

Understanding how the odorous gas is produced could be important because it is implicated in cloud formation over the ocean and helps some animals find food.

Knowledge gap

Scientists had long known that bacteria could be found consuming decay products and producing a gas called dimethyl sulfide, or DMS, in places where plankton and marine plants such as seaweed were dying. This pungent gas is what gives ocean air "sort of a fishy, tangy smell," said study author Andrew Johnston of the University of East Anglia.

But while "it was known that quite a lot of bacteria could [produce DMS], no one had thought to ask how," Johnston told LiveScience.

So that's exactly what he and his colleagues set out to do.

The team took samples of mud from the salt marshes along Britain's coast, and isolated a new strain of bacteria. After sequencing its genes and comparing the genetic structure to other known bacteria, they were able to identify the gene involved in the mechanism that converts the plants' decay products, called DMSP, into DMS.

The mechanism responsible "was absolutely not what anyone expected," Johnston said. The study's findings are detailed in the Feb. 2 issue of the journal Science.

Unexpected twist

Scientists had thought that a simple enzyme would be used to break down the DMSP into DMS, but the process turned out to be more complicated as the DMSP proved tougher to breakdown than suspected.

As with many other processes, the bacteria are cleverly conservative: the mechanism stays off until decaying plankton are around. But when a plankton bloom in the ocean is, for example, killed off by a viral attack, the bacteria rush in to reap the benefit.

"The bacteria will only switch on the genes to break down DMSP if the DMSP is around," Johnston said.

Johnston and his team were also able to clone the gene and transfer it to bacteria that lacked it, including E. coli, giving the bacteria the ability to produce DMS gas.

This mechanism is neither the only way, nor the primary way, that bacteria break down the estimated 1 billion tons of DMSP in the ocean, Johnston said, but it is important nonetheless as DMS releases over the open ocean influences cloud formation, which can influence Earth's climate.

Some seabirds rely on DMS as a homing scent to find food. On one occasion during their field research, Johnston and his team opened a bottle filled with the DMS-producing bacteria only to be bombarded by hungry seabirds.


The smell of rain

At the end of this story, it gives you two options. I think you will figure out what option I chose.

A cold March wind danced around the dead of night in Dallas as the doctor walked into the small hospital room of Diana Blessing. She was still groggy from surgery.

Her husband, David, held her hand as they braced themselves for the latest news.
That afternoon of March 10, 1991 , complications had forced Diana, only 24-weeks pregnant, to undergo an emergency Cesarean to deliver couple's new daughter, Dana Lu Blessing.

At 12 inches long and weighing only one pound nine ounces, they already knew she was perilously premature.

Still, the doctor's soft words dropped like bombs.

"I don't think she's going to make it," he said, as kindly as he could.

"There's only a 10-percent chance she will live through the night, and even then, if by some slim chance she does make it, her future could be a very cruel one"

Numb with disbelief, David and Diana listened as the doctor described the devastating problems Dana would likely face if she survived.

She would never walk, she would never talk, she would probably be blind, and she would certainly be prone to other catastrophic conditions from cerebral palsy to complete mental retardation, and on and on.

"No! No!" was all Diana could say.

She and David, with their 5-year-old son Dustin, had long dreamed of the day they would have a daughter to become a family of four.

Now, within a matter of hours, that dream was slipping away

But as those first days passed, a new agony set in for David and Diana. Because Dana's underdeveloped nervous system was essentially 'raw', the lightest kiss or caress only intensified her discomfort, so they couldn't even cradle their tiny baby girl against their chests to offer the strength of their love.

All they could do, as Dana struggled alone beneath the ultraviolet light in the tangle of tubes and wires, was to pray that God would stay close to their precious little girl.

There was never a moment when Dana suddenly grew stronger.

But as the weeks went by, she did slowly gain an ounce of weight here and an ounce of strength there.

At last, when Dana turned two months old. her parents were able to hold her in their arms for the very first time.

And two months later, though doctors continued to gently but grimly warn that her chances of surviving, much less living any kind of normal life, were next to zero, Dana went home from the hospital, just as her mother had predicted.

Five years later, when Dana was a petite but feisty young girl with glittering gray eyes and an unquenchable zest for life.

She showed no signs whatsoever of any mental or physical impairment. Simply, she was everything a little girl can be and more. But that happy ending is far from the end of her story.

One blistering afternoon in the summer of 1996 near her home in Irving , Texas , Dana was sitting in her mother's lap in the bleachers of a local ball park where her brother Dustin's baseball team was practicing.

As always, Dana was chattering nonstop with her mother and several other adults sitting nearby when she suddenly fell silent . Hugging her arms across her chest, little Dana asked, "Do you smell that?"

Smelling the air and detecting the approach of a thunderstorm, Diana replied, "Yes, it smells like r ain."

Dana closed her eyes and again asked, "Do you smell that?"

Once again, her mother replied, "Yes, I think we're about to get wet. It smells like rain."

Still caught in the moment, Dana shook her head, patted her thin shoulders with her small hands and loudly announced,
"No, it smells like Him.

It smells like God when you lay your head on His chest."

Tears blurred Diana's eyes as Dana happily hopped down to play with the other children.

Before the rains came, her daughter's words confirmed what Diana and all the members of the extended Blessing family had known, at least in their hearts, all along.

During those long days and nights of her first two months of her life, when her nerves were too sensitive for them to touch her, God was holding Dana on His chest and it is His loving scent that she remembers so well.

"I can do all things in Him who strengthens me."

This morning when the Lord opened a window to Heaven, He saw me, and He asked: "My child, what is your greatest wish for today?" I responded:
"Lord please, take care of the person who is reading this message, their family and their special friends. They deserve it and I love them very much" The love of God is like the ocean, you can see its beginning, but not its end.