Newly discovered deep-branching marine plastid lineages are numerically rare but globally distributed
Date
2017-01-09Author
Choi, Chang Jae
Concept link
Bachy, Charles
Concept link
Spiro Jaeger, Gualtiero
Concept link
Poirier, Camille
Concept link
Sudek, Lisa
Concept link
Sarma, V. V. S. S.
Concept link
Mahadevan, Amala
Concept link
Giovannoni, Stephen J.
Concept link
Worden, Alexandra Z.
Concept link
Metadata
Show full item recordCitable URI
https://hdl.handle.net/1912/8662As published
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2016.11.032DOI
10.1016/j.cub.2016.11.032Abstract
Ocean surface warming is resulting in an expansion of stratified, low-nutrient environments, a process referred to as ocean desertification. A challenge for assessing the impact of these changes is the lack of robust baseline information on the biological communities that carry out marine photosynthesis. Phytoplankton perform half of global biological CO2 uptake, fuel marine food chains, and include diverse eukaryotic algae that have photosynthetic organelles (plastids) acquired through multiple evolutionary events. While amassing data from ocean ecosystems for the Baselines Initiative (6,177 near full-length 16S rRNA gene sequences and 9.4 million high-quality 16S V1-V2 amplicons) we identified two deep-branching plastid lineages based on 16S rRNA gene data. The two lineages have global distributions, but do not correspond to known phytoplankton. How the newly discovered phytoplankton lineages contribute to food chains and vertical carbon export to the deep sea remains unknown, but their prevalence in expanding, low nutrient surface waters suggests they will have a role in future oceans.
Description
© The Author(s), 2017. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in Current Biology 27 (2017): R15–R16, doi:10.1016/j.cub.2016.11.032.
Collections
Suggested Citation
Current Biology 27 (2017): R15–R16The following license files are associated with this item: