Edward DeLong

In the years following, DeLong's work took him to the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute and it is during his time there that he made a crucial discovery in the understanding of the Earth's carbon and energy cycles. A team of microbiologists led by DeLong discovered a gene in several species of bacteria responsible for production of the protein rhodopsin, previously unheard of in the domain Bacteria. These proteins found in the cell membranes are capable of converting light energy to biochemical energy due to a change in configuration of the rhodopsin molecule as sunlight strikes it, causing the pumping of a proton from inside out and a subsequent inflow that generates the energy. In 2004, DeLong moved to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he worked on developing gene expression studies targeting microbial communities in the wild. At MIT, his collaborations with CMORE and Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute colleagues, he discovered of highly synchronized microbial populations having oscillating patterns of gene expression across many species. In 2014, DeLong relocated to the University of Hawaii, where he serves as co-director for the Center for Microbial Oceanography: Research and Education, C-MORE and the Simons Collaboration on Ocean Processes and Ecology, SCOPE.

After receiving an independent study award in 1989, DeLong spent some time at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and would later on become Associate Professor in the Biology and Ecology, Evolution, and Marine Biology Departments at the University of California, Santa Barbara. DeLong's surveys during his time at UCSB led him to participate in the study of widespread abundance and diversity of marine archaea in the world's oceans. Prior to 1992, archaea were thought only to exist in the extreme environments of hypersaline lakes, hydrothermal vents, and similar places. This changed the general view of the scientific community on the role of archaea in the biosphere and opened up new possibilities in applied potential of such microbial assemblages.

DeLong was born in Sonoma, California. He studied biology at Santa Rosa Junior College and obtained an A.S. degree in 1980. While continuing his education at the University of California, Davis, DeLong had originally planned on becoming a medical technologist, but after a meeting and working as an undergraduate researcher with bacteriologist Paul Baumann, he found a new interest in marine microbiology. He graduated with a B.S. degree in bacteriology at UCD in 1982 and moved to the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, where he received a Ph.D. in marine biology after finishing doctoral work with Art Yayanos in 1986. DeLong completed his postdoctoral training at Indiana University in Bloomington with Norman Pace, where he surveyed communities of picoplankton via DNA sequencing.

Edward Francis DeLong (born 1958), is a marine microbiologist and professor in the Department of Oceanography at the University of Hawaii, Manoa, and is considered a pioneer in the field of metagenomics. He is best known for his discovery of the bacterial use of the rhodopsin protein in converting sunlight to biochemical energy in marine microbial communities.