The cyanobacterium Prochlorococcus has divergent light-harvesting antennae and may have evolved in a low-oxygen ocean

Autor: Carlos Henríquez-Castillo, Salvador Ramírez-Flandes, Alejandro A. Murillo, Ramunas Stepanauskas, Alvaro M Plominsky, Connor Morgan-Lang, Steven J. Hallam, Osvaldo Ulloa
Rok vydání: 2021
Předmět:
Zdroj: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 118
ISSN: 1091-6490
0027-8424
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2025638118
Popis: Marine picocyanobacteria of the genus Prochlorococcus are the most abundant photosynthetic organisms in the modern ocean, where they exert a profound influence on elemental cycling and energy flow. The use of transmembrane chlorophyll complexes instead of phycobilisomes as light-harvesting antennae is considered a defining attribute of Prochlorococcus Its ecology and evolution are understood in terms of light, temperature, and nutrients. Here, we report single-cell genomic information on previously uncharacterized phylogenetic lineages of this genus from nutrient-rich anoxic waters of the eastern tropical North and South Pacific Ocean. The most basal lineages exhibit optical and genotypic properties of phycobilisome-containing cyanobacteria, indicating that the characteristic light-harvesting antenna of the group is not an ancestral attribute. Additionally, we found that all the indigenous lineages analyzed encode genes for pigment biosynthesis under oxygen-limited conditions, a trait shared with other freshwater and coastal marine cyanobacteria. Our findings thus suggest that Prochlorococcus diverged from other cyanobacteria under low-oxygen conditions before transitioning from phycobilisomes to transmembrane chlorophyll complexes and may have contributed to the oxidation of the ancient ocean.
Databáze: OpenAIRE