Unicellular Cyanobacteria Are Important Components of Phytoplankton Communities in Australia's Northern Oceanic Ecoregions.

ABSTRACT: The tropical marine environments of northern Australia encompasses a diverse range of geomorphological and oceanographic conditions and high levels of productivity and nitrogen fixation. However, efforts to characterize phytoplankton assemblages in these waters have been restricted to studies using microscopic and pigment analyses, leading to the current consensus that this region is dominated by large diatoms, dinoflagellates, and the marine cyanobacterium Trichodesmium. During an oceanographic transect from the Arafura Sea through the Torres Strait to the Coral Sea, we characterized prokaryotic and eukaryotic phytoplankton communities in surface waters using a combination of flow cytometry and Illumina based 16S and 18S ribosomal RNA amplicon sequencing. Similar to observations in

SUBMITTER: Moore LR 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6351784 | biostudies-literature | 2018

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature