Marine cyanobacteria serve as food fragments to underwater sea plant life Science 2.0 reported Friday.
Yale post-doctorate student Steven Biller, Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Sallie Chisholm and lead investigator of a study made the discovery Science 2.0 reported.
"The finding that vesicles are so abundant in the oceans really expands the context in which we need to understand these structures," Steven Biller, a post doctorate student at Yale University told Science 2.0. "Vesicles are a previously unrecognized and unexplored component of the dissolved organic carbon in marine ecosystems, and they could prove to be an important vehicle for genetic and biogeochemical exchange in the oceans," Biller told Science 2.0. Biller was also an author of the study Science 2.0 reported.
The team also found large quantities of blisters on the outside of cyanobacteria prochlorococcus and synechoccocus, which give off oxygen and transport water through photosynthesis, the process plants use to change water and carbon dioxide into food Science 2.0 reported. The cysts were found in the cyanobacteria, and seawater Science 2.0 reported.
"Prochlorococcus is the smallest genome that can make organic carbon from sunlight and carbon dioxide and it's packaging this carbon and releasing it into the seawater around it," Chisholm, told Science 2.0. Chisholm is also the Lee and Geraldine Martin Professor of Environmental Studies in MIT's department of civil and environmental engineering and department of biology. Science 2.0. "There must be an evolutionary advantage to doing this. Our challenge is to figure out what it is," Chisholm told Science 2.0.
"Marine cyanobacteria of the genera Prochlorococcus and Synechoccocus are the two most abundant phototrophs," David Scanlan, a professor at the University of Warwick told Science 2.0. Scanlan did not participate in the study. "By releasing extracellular vesicles these organisms shed new light on the importance of such particles in the largest ecosystem on Earth - the open ocean - with implications for marine carbon cycling, mechanisms of horizontal gene transfer, and as a defense against phage attack," Scanlan told Science 2.0.
