Cryptophytes are a diverse lineage of marine and freshwater, photosynthetic and secondarily nonphotosynthetic algae that acquired their plastids (chloroplasts) by "secondary" (i.e., eukaryote-eukaryote) endosymbiosis. Consequently, they are among the most genetically complex cells known and have four genomes: a mitochondrial, plastid, "master" nuclear, and residual nuclear genome of secondary e...

The microalgal pigment phycoerythrin (PE) is of commercial interest as natural colorant in food and cosmetics, as well as fluoroprobes for laboratory analysis. Several methods for extraction and quantification of PE are available but they comprise typically various extraction buffers, repetitive freeze-thaw cycles and liquid nitrogen, making extraction procedures more complicated. A simple meth...

This article presents an investigation of the energy migration dynamics in intact cells of the unicellular photosynthetic cryptophyte Chroomonas CCMP270 by steady-state and time-resolved fluorescence measurements. By kinetic modeling of the fluorescence data on chlorophyll and phycocyanin 645 excitation (at 400 and 582 nm respectively), it has been possible to show the excited state energy dist...

We conducted a series of experiments using the herbivorous zooplankter Daphnia pulex to investigate the nutritional importance of dietary polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs). Daphnia were fed three different diets: (1) a PUFA-deficient cyanophyte mixture, (2) a cyanophyte mixture with fatty acid (FA) amendments, or (3) a PUFArich cryptophyte mixture. We devised a novel method using customized p...

Cryptophytes are an ecologically important group of largely photosynthetic unicellular eukaryotes. This lineage is of great interest to evolutionary biologists because their plastids are of red algal secondary endosymbiotic origin and the host cell retains four different genomes (host nuclear, mitochondrial, plastid, and red algal nucleomorph). Here, we report a comparative analysis of plastid ...

Ciliates within the Mesodinium rubrum/Mesodinium major species complex harbor chloroplasts and other cell organelles from specific cryptophyte species. was recently described, new studies indicate that blooms of M. are just as common rubrum. Despite this, physiology has never been studied compared to In this study, growth, food uptake, chlorophyll a photosynthesis were measured at six different...

Plastid genes encoding light-independent protochlorophyllide oxidoreductase (LIPOR) subunits were isolated from cryptophyte algae, the first example of such genes in plastids of secondary endosymbiotic origin. The presence of functional and nonfunctional copies of LIPOR genes in cryptophytes suggests that light-independent chlorophyll biosynthesis is a nonessential pathway in these organisms.