We sequenced the nuclear small subunit ribosomal DNA coding region from 20 members of the Bangiophycidae and from two members of the Florideophycidae to gain insights into red algal evolution. A combined alignment of nuclear and plastid small subunit rDNA and a data set of Rubisco protein sequences were also studied to complement the understanding of bangiophyte phylogeny and to address red alg...

The RAB GTPases, which are involved in regulation of endomembrane trafficking, exhibit a complex but incompletely understood evolutionary history. We elucidated the evolution of the RAB1 subfamily ancestrally implicated in the endoplasmic reticulum-to-Golgi traffic. We found that RAB1 paralogs have been generated over the course of eukaryotic evolution, with some duplications coinciding with th...

We tested the influence of two light intensities [40 and 300 μmol PAR / (m(2)s)] on the fatty acid composition of three distinct lipid classes in four freshwater phytoplankton species. We chose species of different taxonomic classes in order to detect potentially similar reaction characteristics that might also be present in natural phytoplankton communities. From samples of the bacillariophyte...

The natural environment of phytoplankton is variable in manifold ways. Light, as essential resource for photosynthetic phytoplankton, fluctuates its intensity (quantity) well spectrum (quality) over great temporal scales aquatic ecosystems. To elucidate the significance heterogeneity available light we analyzed growth four marine North Sea species (chlorophyte Tetraselmis sp., cryptophyte Rhodo...

The West Antarctic Peninsula (henceforth “Peninsula”) is experiencing rapid warming and melting that impacting the regional marine food web. primary phytoplankton groups along are diatoms cryptophytes. Relative to diatoms, there has been little focus on cryptophytes, thus our understanding of their diversity ecology limited, especially at species level. This gap important, as cryptophytes play ...

The Rhodophyta (red algae) are composed of the subclasses Bangiophycidae and Florideophycidae. Two evolutionarily interesting features of the Bangiophycidae are: (1) they are the ancestral pool from which the more morphologically complex taxa in the Florideophycidae have arisen and (2) they are the sources of the plastids, through secondary endosymbioses, for the Cryptophyta, Haptophyta, and th...

Mesodinium rubrum is a globally distributed nontoxic ciliate that is known to produce intense red-colored blooms using enslaved chloroplasts from its algal prey. Although frequent enough to have been observed by Darwin, blooms of M. rubrum are notoriously difficult to quantify because M. rubrum can aggregate into massive clouds of rusty-red water in a very short time due to its high growth rate...

Algae include a diverse array of photosynthetic eukaryotes excluding land plants. Explaining the origin of algal plastids continues to be a major challenge in evolutionary biology. Current knowledge suggests that plastid primary endosymbiosis, in which a single-celled protist engulfs and "enslaves" a cyanobacterium, likely occurred once and resulted in the primordial alga. This eukaryote then g...

Methanol is a major volatile organic compound on Earth and serves as an important carbon and energy substrate for abundant methylotrophic microbes. Previous geochemical surveys coupled with predictive models suggest that the marine contributions are exceedingly large, rivaling terrestrial sources. Although well studied in terrestrial ecosystems, methanol sources are poorly understood in the mar...

Cryptophytes are unicellular photosynthetic algae that use a lumenally located light-harvesting system, which is distinct from the phycobilisome structure found in cyanobacteria and red algae. One of the key components of this system is water-soluble phycoerythrin (PE) 545 whose expression is enhanced by low light levels. The crystal structure of the heterodimeric alpha(1)alpha(2)betabeta PE 54...