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The Oceans Are A Melting Pot Of Microbes

https://sciencespies.com/news/the-oceans-are-a-melting-pot-of-microbes/

The Oceans Are A Melting Pot Of Microbes

Diatoms are photosynthesising algae, they have a siliceous skeleton (frustule) and are found in … [+] almost every aquatic environment including fresh and marine waters, soils, in fact almost anywhere moist.

Getty

Within every drop of seawater lives a mixture of teeny-tiny organisms, like bacteria and viruses, collectively known as ‘microbes’.

According to new research published in Cell by scientists at Maine’s Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences, the degree of microbial diversity within the ocean is perhaps more staggering than originally thought. In the largest study ever conducted on individual cells, over 12,000 microbial genomes were analyzed to build a massive database, dubbed the Global Ocean Reference Genomes Tropics (GORG-Tropics).

The samples were collected from the tropics and subtropics, representing about two-thirds of the world’s ocean. To the researcher’s surprise, every one of the 12,000 cells they analyzed had a unique genome – no two cells were identical. What’s more, most of the microbes were so dissimilar from all the other microbes analyzed that they were considered to be different species altogether.

A summary of the new study published in Cell by researchers from the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean … [+] Sciences.

Pachiadaki et al., Cell

The researchers also analyzed the microbial diversity within a single teaspoon of water from the Sargasso Sea. An astonishing 6,000 cells were captured, analyzed, and added to the growing database.

Of all the genes discovered within the Sargasso Sea sample, at least one-fifth were genes also found in the tropics and subtropics. According to these microbial experts, these large portion of shared genes between the Sargasso Sea and the tropics despite immense microbial diversity indicates how effective ocean currents are at mixing microbial life around the globe.

“In the same way that we think of New York City as a melting pot, every teaspoon of the ocean is a microbial melting pot,” said Ramunas Stepanauskas, Senior Research Scientist at Bigelow. “The ocean is huge, and it’s amazing how complex ecological and evolutionary processes take place in each tiny drop.”

Map of the Sargasso Sea.

Staysail, Dreamstime.com

With the help of cutting-edge genome analysis technology, this study sequenced more microbes than all studies prior to 2013, combined. With an abundance of information, new discoveries have followed. For example, Stepanauskas’ team discovered a group of bacteria, known as proteobacteria, previously not known to have photosynthetic, or light harnessing, capabilities.

“Genetic information can teach us a lot about ecology, and these may be photosynthetic organisms that were unnoticed before,” said Maria Pachiadaki, a former Bigelow Laboratory postdoctoral researcher and lead author of this study. “If experiments confirm what the genes suggest, this is an important microbial group to consider in ocean carbon studies.”

With less than 1% of marine microorganisms proving possible to grow and study in a laboratory setting, databases like GORG-Tropics are essential for advancing our understanding of microbial capabilities.

Senior Research Scientist Ramunas Stepanauskas holds a sample of Sargasso Sea water before analysis … [+] in Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences’ Single Cell Genomics Center.

Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences

In collaboration with researchers at the University of California San Diego, this research team also identified microbes that could fuel novel biotechnology applications. By tracking which microbes are able to produce certain chemicals, the GORG-Tropics database may help fast-track future discoveries of new antibiotics or cancer-fighting medicines.

With a database of this size, the potential for discovery continues. Stepanauskas and his team of researchers will continue to search for more discoveries to further reveal the hidden microbial diversity of the ocean, and in turn, the intricacies of how the ocean functions.

“One of our main goals with the GORG initiative was to produce a powerful resource for the marine microbiology research community,” said Julia Brown, a bioinformatician at Bigelow Laboratory and a study author. “We hope that scientists will be able to use this dataset in follow-up studies to answer questions no one has even thought of yet.”

#News

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Giant whale sharks have hundreds of tiny teeth-like structures around their eyes

https://sciencespies.com/nature/giant-whale-sharks-have-hundreds-of-tiny-teeth-like-structures-around-their-eyes/

Giant whale sharks have hundreds of tiny teeth-like structures around their eyes

Whale sharks, the majestic creatures that also happen to be the world’s largest fish, are far more gentle than the name suggests. They swim lazily around tropical waters, filter-feeding on plankton.

Now, biologists have discovered the enigmatic giants have a curious trick up their sleeve – teeth-like scales adorning their eyeballs. It appears to be the whale sharks’ version of eyelids, and one we haven’t seen in any other vertebrate.

“Eyeballs face a potential risk of damage from mechanical, chemical and biological hazards,” the researchers write in a new paper describing the find.

“This report elaborates on adaptations of the eyes of the whale shark (Rhincodon typus), including the discovery that they are covered with dermal denticles, which is a novel mechanism of eye protection in vertebrates.”

Dermal denticles, also known as placoid scales, are the tiny tough scales that cover sharks and rays. But although they are scales as we think of them, they’re also structurally very similar to teeth, and include an inner core of pulp, a middle layer of dentine or bony tissue, and a hard enamel-like coating on top.

We already knew that many sharks – including whale sharks – are covered with these denticles. However, finding them on the eyeballs of these fish is quite the surprise.

Eye denticles of the whale shark. (Tomita et al., PLOS One, 2020)

That’s partially because it’s long been assumed whale sharks don’t have to use their sense of sight much: their eyes are incredibly small compared to the rest of their body, and they don’t have a lot of midbrain, the part of the brain that processes vision.

“However, the highly protected features of the whale shark eye, in contrast to the traditional view, seems to suggest the importance of vision in this species,” the team argues in their study.

Researchers took a CT scanner to a preserved whale shark eyeball, as well as taking ultrasounds of two captive live whale sharks at the Okinawa Churaumi Aquarium in Japan.

3D rendering of the morphology of each eye denticle. (Tomita et al., PLOS One, 2020)

As well as discovering the eye denticles, the researchers also elaborated on the mechanisms whale sharks use to retract their eyes back into their head. Most of the time this can be for just a short period of time, however not always. Once, a particularly unfortunate shark ended up with its eyes retracted for 10 days after it was transferred to a new aquarium from Taiwan to Atlanta, Georgia.

“It is likely that whale sharks maintain their vision during eye retraction because the pupils of the whale sharks in this study were not completely covered with surrounding white tissues when their eyes had retracted, though their visual field would be much more restricted than when their eyes are positioned normally,” explain the researchers.

“In fact, the animal that kept its eyes retracted for approximately 10 days at the Georgia Aquarium appeared to have no problem navigating the exhibit space, until its eyes returned to their normal positions suddenly and, apparently, spontaneously.”

So, while whale sharks aren’t exactly a fearsome predator of the ocean, these two eye-protecting features are a fearsome competitor to… eyelids.

The research has been published in PLOS One.

#Nature