Publication Date
9-1-2022
Document Type
Article
Publication Title
mSystems
Volume
7
Issue
5
DOI
10.1128/msystems.00729-22
Abstract
Nearly half of carbon fixation and primary production originates from marine phytoplankton, and much of it occurs in episodic blooms in upwelling regimes. Here, we simulated blooms limited by nitrogen and iron by incubating Monterey Bay surface waters with subnutricline waters and inorganic nutrients and measured the wholecommunity transcriptomic response during mid- and late-bloom conditions. Cell counts revealed that centric and pennate diatoms (largely Pseudo-nitzschia and Chaetoceros spp.) were the major blooming taxa, but dinoflagellates, prasinophytes, and prymnesiophytes also increased. Viral mRNA significantly increased in late bloom and likely played a role in the bloom's demise. We observed conserved shifts in the genetic similarity of phytoplankton populations to cultivated strains, indicating adaptive population-level changes in community composition. Additionally, the density of single nucleotide variants (SNVs) declined in late-bloom samples for most taxa, indicating a loss of intraspecific diversity as a result of competition and a selective sweep of adaptive alleles. We noted differences between mid- and late-bloom metabolism and differential regulation of light-harvesting complexes (LHCs) under nutrient stress. While most LHCs are diminished under nutrient stress, we showed that diverse taxa upregulated specialized, energy-dissipating LHCs in low iron. We also suggest the relative expression of NRT2 compared to the expression of GSII as a marker of cellular nitrogen status and the relative expression of iron starvationinduced protein genes (ISIP1, ISIP2, and ISIP3) compared to the expression of the thiamine biosynthesis gene (thiC) as a marker of iron status in natural diatom communities.
Funding Number
DE-SC0018344
Funding Sponsor
National Science Foundation
Keywords
bloom, diatom, iron, metatranscriptome, nitrogen, phytoplankton
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Department
Moss Landing Marine Laboratories
Recommended Citation
B. C. Kolody, S. R. Smith, L. Zeigler Allen, J. P. McCrow, A. Moustafa, D. Shi, B. M. Hopkinson, F. M.M. Morel, B. B. Ward, and A. E. Allen. "Nitrogen and Iron Availability Drive Metabolic Remodeling and Natural Selection of Diverse Phytoplankton during Experimental Upwelling" mSystems (2022). https://doi.org/10.1128/msystems.00729-22
