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Concept
Photosynthetic picoplankton
Summary
Photosynthetic picoplankton or picophytoplankton is the fraction of the phytoplankton performing photosynthesis composed of cells between 0.2 and 2 μm in size (picoplankton). It is especially important in the central oligotrophic regions of the world oceans that have very low concentration of nutrients.
1952: Description of the first truly picoplanktonic species, Chromulina pusilla, by Butcher. This species was renamed in 1960 to Micromonas pusilla and a few studies have found it to be abundant in temperate oceanic waters, although very little such quantification data exists for eukaryotic picophytoplankton.
1979: Discovery of marine Synechococcus by Waterbury and confirmation with electron microscopy by Johnson and Sieburth.
1982: The same Johnson and Sieburth demonstrate the importance of small eukaryotes by electron microscopy.
1983: W.K.W Li and colleagues, including Trevor Platt show that a large fraction of marine primary production is due to organisms smaller than 2 μm.
1986: Discovery of "prochlorophytes" by Chisholm and Olson in the Sargasso Sea, named in 1992 as Prochlorococcus marinus.
1994: Discovery in the Thau lagoon in France of the smallest photosynthetic eukaryote known to date, Ostreococcus tauri, by Courties.
2001: Through sequencing of the ribosomal RNA gene extracted from marine samples, several European teams discover that eukaryotic picoplankton are highly diverse. This finding followed on the first discovery of such eukaryotic diversity in 1998 by Rappe and colleagues at Oregon State University, who were the first to apply rRNA sequencing to eukaryotic plankton in the open-ocean, where they discovered sequences that seemed distant from known phytoplankton The cells containing DNA matching one of these novel sequences were recently visualized and further analyzed using specific probes and found to be broadly distributed.
Because of its very small size, picoplankton is difficult to study by classic methods such as optical microscopy. More sophisticated methods are needed.
Official source
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