Abstract
Quantifying the contribution of marine microorganisms to carbon and nitrogen cycles and their response to predicted ocean warming is one of the main challenges of microbial oceanography. Here we present a single-cell NanoSIMS isotope analysis to quantify C and N uptake by free-living and attached phytoplankton and heterotrophic bacteria, and their response to short-term experimental warming of 4 °C. Elevated temperature increased total C fixation by over 50%, a small but significant fraction of which was transferred to heterotrophs within 12 h. Cell-to-cell attachment doubled the secondary C uptake by heterotrophic bacteria and increased secondary N incorporation by autotrophs by 68%. Warming also increased the abundance of phytoplankton with attached heterotrophs by 80%, and promoted C transfer from phytoplankton to bacteria by 17% and N transfer from bacteria to phytoplankton by 50%. Our results indicate that phytoplankton-bacteria attachment provides an ecological advantage for nutrient incorporation, suggesting a mutualistic relationship that appears to be enhanced by temperature increases.
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Acknowledgements
This work was partially supported by COMITE project by Spanish National Investigation+Development+Innovation (I+D+I). Financial support for NAG’s PhD fellowship was provided by the Basque Government. LAS was supported by a ‘Juan de la Cierva’ fellowship from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Education and a Marie Curie Reintegration Grant (FP7, Grant Agreement 268331). XM was partially supported by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation Marine Microbiology Initiative grant #3302, and method development at LLNL was funded by the Department of Energy’s Genome Sciences Program grant SCW1039. Work at LLNL was performed under the auspices of the US Department of Energy at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory under Contract DE-AC52-07NA27344.
Author contributions
NAG, XM, LAS and XACM designed the study, NAG carried out the incubation experiment and NanoSIMS sample preparation, XM, PKW and NAG performed NanoSIMS analyses, and NAG, PKW and XM analyzed the data. All authors discussed the results and contributed in the manuscript writing.
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Arandia-Gorostidi, N., Weber, P., Alonso-Sáez, L. et al. Elevated temperature increases carbon and nitrogen fluxes between phytoplankton and heterotrophic bacteria through physical attachment. ISME J 11, 641–650 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/ismej.2016.156
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/ismej.2016.156
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