DON as a source of bioavailable nitrogen for phytoplankton

By D. Bronk, J. H. See, P. Bradley, L. Killberg. 2006

542 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract. Relative to inorganic nitrogen, concentrations of dissolved organic nitrogen (DON) are often high, even in regions believed to be nitrogen-limited. The persistence of these high concentrations led to the view that the DON pool was largely refractory and therefore unimportant to plankton nutrition. Any DON that was utilized was believed to fuel bacterial production. More recent work, however, indicates that fluxes into and out of the DON pool can be large, and that the constancy in concentration is a function of tightly coupled production and consumption processes. Evidence is also accumulating which indicates that phytoplankton, including a number of harmful species, may obtain a substantial part of their nitrogen nutrition from organic compounds. Ongoing research includes ways to discriminate between autotrophic and heterotrophic utilization, as well as a number of mechanisms, such as cell surface enzymes and photochemical decomposition, that could facilitate phytoplankton use of DON components.

Subfields: Ecology, Oceanography, Pollution

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7e766f9e26801339e65adc0340a69de5e87a24f7

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Ecology

In Oceanography

In Pollution

Citations in the corpus

The role of nitrogenous nutrients in the occurrence of harmful algal blooms caused by Cochlodinium polykrikoides in New York estuaries (USA) (2012, background): “Dinoflagellates are often mixotrophic (Smayda, 1997; Burkholder et al., 2008). Mulholland et al. (2009) recently demonstrated that bloom populations of C.”
Influence of jellyfish blooms on carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus cycling and plankton production (2008, background): “At least part of the directly excreted DON, in addition to DON that leaches from egested material and occurs in mucus, would be directly available to the phytoplankton (Bronk et al., 2006 and references therein).”
Dissolved organic matter (DOM) release by phytoplankton in the contemporary and future ocean (2014, background): “Many phytoplankton are also consumers of DON as a nitrogen source; it is often the largest pool of dissolved nitrogen in marine waters and it is less refractory than once thought (Bronk et al., 2007).”
Dissolved organic nitrogen uptake by seagrasses (2008, background): “Second, Marbá et al. (2006) showed that the maximum translocation rate of nutrients between seagrass ramets is less than 1 cm h21 (80 cm over a time span of 4 days).”