Prochlorococcus ecotype abundances in the North Atlantic Ocean as revealed by an improved quantitative PCR method.

ABSTRACT: The cyanobacterium Prochlorococcus numerically dominates the photosynthetic community in the tropical and subtropical regions of the world's oceans. Six evolutionary lineages of Prochlorococcus have been described, and their distinctive physiologies and genomes indicate that these lineages are "ecotypes" and should have different oceanic distributions. Two methods recently developed to quantify these ecotypes in the field, probe hybridization and quantitative PCR (QPCR), have shown that this is indeed the case. To facilitate a global investigation of these ecotypes, we modified our QPCR protocol to significantly increase its speed, sensitivity, and accessibility and validated the method in the western and eastern North Atlantic Ocean. We showed that all six ecotypes had distinct distributi

SUBMITTER: Zinser ER 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC1352191 | biostudies-literature | 2006 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature