With the wide acceptance of the long-chain (LC) n-3 PUFA EPA and DHA as important nutrients playing a role in the amelioration of certain diseases, efforts to understand factors affecting intakes of these fatty acids along with potential strategies to increase them are vital. Widespread aversion to oil-rich fish, the richest natural source of EPA and DHA, highlights both the highly suboptimal c...

Benthic algae are associated with coral death in the form of stress and disease. It's been proposed that they release exudates, which facilitate invasion of potentially pathogenic microbes at the coral-algal interface, resulting in coral disease. However, the original source of these pathogens remains unknown. This study examined the ability of benthic algae to act as reservoirs of coral pathog...

BACKGROUND Algal biofilm technology is recently supposed to be a promising method to produce algal biomass as the feedstock for the production of biofuels. However, the carrier materials currently used to form algal biofilm are either difficult to be obtained at a low price or undurable. Commercialization of the biofilm technology for algal biomass production extremely requires new and inexpens...

In photosynthetic eukaryotes, many genes were transferred from plastids or algal endosymbionts to nuclear genomes of host cells. These transferred genes are often considered genetic footprints of plastids. However, genes of algal origin have also been detected in some plastid-lacking eukaryotes, and these genes are often cited as evidence of historical plastids. In this paper, we discuss two re...

Mercury accumulation in fish is a global public health concern, because fish are the primary source of toxic methylmercury to humans. Fish from all lakes do not pose the same level of risk to consumers. One of the most intriguing patterns is that potentially dangerous mercury concentrations can be found in fish from clear, oligotrophic lakes whereas fish from greener, eutrophic lakes often carr...

The primary objective of this research is to investigate phytoplankton community response to variations in physical forcing and biological processes in the Cold Tongue region of the equatorial Pacific Ocean at 0N, 140W. This research objective was addressed using a one-dimensional multicomponent lower trophic level ecosystem model that includes detailed algal physiology, such as spectrally-depe...

We evaluated the potential for grazers to regulate benthic algal biomass and taxonomic composition in an Alaskan marsh after enrichment with nutrients that are expected to increase in the region with ongoing climate change. We nested caged and uncaged substrates together inside mesocosm enclosures with natural abundances of snails or no snails and with or without nutrient enrichment (NO3 + PO4 ...

Algal blooms occur frequently in the coastal waters of the western South China Sea (SCS). This paper reports spatial and temporal variations of algal bloom events in these waters from 1993 to 2007. Twenty-five algal bloom events occurred in summer in the coastal waters of South and Central Vietnam where they were associated with wind-induced, coastal, nutrient upwelling and river discharges; a ...

Red algae have the most gene-rich plastid genomes known, but despite their evolutionary importance these genomes remain poorly sampled. Here we characterize three complete and one partial plastid genome from a diverse range of florideophytes. By unifying annotations across all available red algal plastid genomes we show they all share a highly compact and slowly-evolving architecture and unique...