Picoplankton Bloom in Global South? A High Fraction of Aerobic Anoxygenic Phototrophic Bacteria in Metagenomes from a Coastal Bay (Arraial do Cabo--Brazil).

Marine habitats harbor a great diversity of microorganism from the three domains of life, only a small fraction of which can be cultivated. Metagenomic approaches are increasingly popular for addressing microbial diversity without culture, serving as sensitive and relatively unbiased methods for identifying and cataloging the diversity of nucleic acid sequences derived from organisms in environmental samples. Aerobic anoxygenic phototrophic bacteria (AAP) play important roles in carbon and energy cycling in aquatic systems. In oceans, those bacteria are widely distributed; however, their abundance and importance are still poorly understood. The aim of this study was to estimate abundance and diversity of AAPs in metagenomes from an upwelling affected coastal bay in Arraial do Cabo, Brazil, using in silico screening for the anoxygenic photosynthesis core genes. Metagenomes from the Global Ocean Sample Expedition (GOS) were screened for comparative purposes. AAPs were highly abundant in the free-living bacterial fraction from Arraial do Cabo: 23.88% of total bacterial cells, compared with 15% in the GOS dataset. Of the ten most AAP abundant samples from GOS, eight were collected close to the Equator where solar irradiation is high year-round. We were able to assign most retrieved sequences to phylo-groups, with a particularly high abundance of Roseobacter in Arraial do Cabo samples. The high abundance of AAP in this tropical bay may be related to the upwelling phenomenon and subsequent picoplankton bloom. These results suggest a link between upwelling and light abundance and demonstrate AAP even in oligotrophic tropical and subtropical environments. Longitudinal studies in the Arraial do Cabo region are warranted to understand the dynamics of AAP at different locations and seasons, and the ecological role of these unique bacteria for biogeochemical and energy cycling in the ocean.

Predominance of Roseobacter, Sulfitobacter, Glaciecola and Psychrobacter in seawater collected off Ushuaia, Argentina, Sub-Antarctica.

Bacterial diversity in sub-Antarctic seawater, collected off Ushuaia, Argentina, was examined using a culture independent approach. The composition of the 16S rRNA gene libraries from seawater and seawater contaminated with the water soluble fraction of crude oil was statistically different (P value 0.001). In both libraries, clones representing the Alphaproteobacteria, Gammaproteobacteria, the Cytophaga-Flavobacterium-Bacteroidetes group and unculturable bacteria were dominant. Clones associated with the genera Roseobacter, Sulfitobacter, Staleya, Glaciecola, Colwellia, Marinomonas, Cytophaga and Cellulophaga were common to both the libraries. However, clones associated with Psychrobacter, Arcobacter, Formosa algae, Polaribacter, Ulvibacter and Tenacibaculum were found only in seawater contaminated with hydrocarbons (Table 1). Further, the percentage of clones of Roseobacter, Sulfitobacter and Glaceicola was high in seawater (43%, 90% and 12% respectively) compared to seawater contaminated with hydrocarbons (35%, 4% and 9% respectively). One of the clones F2C63 showed 100% similarity with Marinomonas ushuaiensis a bacterium identified by us from the same site.