Distribution and host diversity of Amoebophryidae parasites across oligotrophic waters of the Mediterranean Sea

By R. Siano, C. Alves-de-Souza, E. Foulon, E. M. Bendif, N. Simon, Laure Guillou, Fabrice Not. 2010

87 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Sequences affiliated to Syndiniales (Marine alve- olate, MALV) regularly dominate 18S rDNA genetic li- braries of nearly all marine ecosystems investigated so far. Among them, Amoebophryidae (MALV group II) is com- posed of numerous and genetically distant environmental se- quences, where Amoebophrya is the only known and for- mally described genus. Amoebophrya species include vir- ulent pathogens for a wide range of dinoflagellate species. Beside their regular occurrence in marine ecosystems, their quantitative distribution and the environmental factors trig- gering host infection have barely been studied in open olig- otrophic waters. In order to understand the functional role of these parasites in natural environments, we stud- ied the distribution and contribution to the eukaryotic com- munity of the small free-living stage of Amoebophryidae (the dinospores) along a transect in the Mediterranean Sea, as well as their host diversity at three oligotrophic sta- tions. Dinospores were more abundant at a coastal sta- tion (max. 1.5◊ 10 3 cells ml 1 ) than in oligotrophic waters (max. 51± 16.3 cells ml 1 ), where they represented 10.3 to 34.9% of the total eukaryotic community at 40 and 30 m depth, respectively and 21.2% on average along the water column. Positive correlation was found between dinospore occurrence and higher concentration of NO3 + NO2 at the coastal station. At selected stations, out of 38 different di- noflagellates taxa identified, 15 were infected, among which a majority were not recognized as Amoebophryidae host so far. Prevalences (percentage of infected cells) generally var- ied between 1% and 10%, with a notable exception for Ble- pharocysta paulsenii for which 25% of cells were infected at the most oligotrophic station. The present study shows that dinospores are able to thrive and infect dinoflagellates both in coastal and ultra-oligotrophic open waters. Our re- sults emphasize the role of parasitism in microbial food web dynamics and ultimately on biogeochemical cycles.

Subfields: Ecology, Molecular Biology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/97e6c63168733db0adf8287ece55cec2fa3f24aa

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Citations in the corpus

Diversity and Ecology of Eukaryotic Marine Phytoplankton (2012, background): “There is now a growing awareness of the impact of viruses and of parasitic and mutualistic symbiotic interactions on phytoplankton community structure (Brussaard et al., 2008; Siano et al., 2011) and ultimately on global biogeochemical cycles (Strom, 2008).”
Eukaryotic plankton diversity in the sunlit ocean (2015, background): “Parasites in this size fraction were mostly (89% of diversity and 88% of abundance across all stations) within the MALV-I and -II Syndiniales (30), which are known exclusively as parasitoid species that kill their hosts and release hundreds of small (2 to 10 mm), nonphagotrophic dinospores (9, 44) t”