The origin of cyanobacteria in Antarctic sea ice: Marine or

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TitleThe origin of cyanobacteria in Antarctic sea ice: Marine or freshwater?AbstractCyanobacteria play an important role in the primary productivity of many ecosystems and are dominant in non-marine polar environments. Apart from detecting low levels of cyanobacteria-like pigments in the Southern Ocean, little effort has been spent in trying to elucidate Cyanobacteria in Antarctic sea ice. Here, we report the first use of culture, microscope, microarray and molecular techniques to show that marine Cyanobacteria are rare or absent in sea ice. Our infrequent positive signals were most closely related to freshwater Cyanobacteria from neighbouring terrestrial sources, which illustrates our techniques were sensitive enough to find sea-ice cyanobacteria if they were present. It is still possible that minute quantity of marine cyanobacteria may exist in sea ice and do not contribute significantly to the polar marine ecosystems. © 2012 Society for Applied Microbiology and Blackwell Publishing Ltd.AcknowledgementsWe thank members of Event K043 for their help with field sampling during 2007 and 2008, and acknowledge the logistical and field support of Antarctica New Zealand, especially S. Gordon. We thank M. Severgnini for performing the microarray analysis. This research was supported by New Zealand FRST grant VICX0706 to K. G. R. and VUW SFRG grant 103167 to E. Y. K.

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1st AuthorKoh, E.AuthorKoh, E.Cowie, R.Simpson, A.O'Toole, R.Ryan, K.Year2012JournalEnvironmental Microbiology ReportsVolume4Number5Pages479-483DOI10.1111/j.1758-2229.2012.00346.xURLhttps://www.scopus.com/inward/recor.....472452c43a5c684c0da958c1bKeywordsCyanobacteria, rank5

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TypeArticleCitationThe origin of cyanobacteria in Antarctic sea ice: Marine or freshwater?. Environmental Microbiology Reports, 4(5): 479-483