Tissue loss diseases or white syndromes (WS) are some of the most important coral diseases because they result in significant colony mortality and morbidity, threatening dominant Acroporidae in the Caribbean and Pacific. The causes of WS remain elusive in part because few have examined affected corals at the cellular level. We studied the cellular changes associated with WS over time in a domin...

In the microbial loop, organic matter, Irrespective of its origin and composition, is incorporated in the food chains only after it has been converted into bacterial biomass. The absence of polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs) in bacteria leads to the loss of these components in the initial h k of the microbial loop. Thls results in significant differences in the nutritional value of the initial...

In ciliates, chromosomal rearrangements occur during the development of the somatic macronuclear genome from the germline micronuclear genome. These rearrangements are extensive in three ciliate classes-Armophorea, Spirotrichea, and Phyllopharyngea-generating a macronucleus with up to 20,000,000 gene-sized chromosomes. Earlier, we have shown that these three classes also share elevated rates of...

Illumina reads of the SSU-rDNA-V9 region obtained from the circumglobal Tara Oceans expedition allow the investigation of protistan plankton diversity patterns on a global scale. We analyzed 6,137,350 V9-amplicons from ocean surface waters and the deep chlorophyll maximum, which were taxonomically assigned to the phylum Ciliophora. For open ocean samples global planktonic ciliate diversity is r...

Body size is a fundamental trait determining individual fitness and ecological processes. Reduction in body with increasing temperature has been widely observed most ectotherms endotherms, known as Bergmann's rule. However, we lack data to assess if ciliates, the major consumers of marine primary production, follow rule what drives distributions their cell size. Here, examined set (287 samples)...

The macronuclear genome of hypotrichous ciliates consists of DNA molecules of gene-sized length. A macronuclear DNA molecule contains a single coding region. We have analyzed the many hypotrich macronuclear DNA sequences sequenced by us and others. No highly conserved promoter sequences nor replication initiation sequences have been identified in the 5' nor in the 3' non-translated regions, sug...

Similar to Daphnia, many planktonic ciliates are algivores that occur in virtually every natural lake and reproduce primarily asexually. Due to their larger population size and shorter generation time, their significance as algal consumers and secondary producers may exceed that of Daphnia during algal blooms and when averaged over the season. The high reproduction rate, the ease of culturing, ...

Recent work suggests that there is a high frequency of programmed +1 translational frameshifting in ciliates of the Euplotes genus. Frequent frameshifting may have been potentiated by stop codon reassignment, which is also a feature of this group.