The ocean’s most abundant “loner” microbe can switch between drifting alone and living in attached communities

Amazing stuff! These bacteria are planktonic not platonic! 😊

Remember: Global warming is a hoax and climate change is a religion!

"The oxygen in about every other breath we take comes from microscopic cells — phytoplankton — drifting in the surface of the ocean. Among them is Prochlorococcus, the smallest and most abundant photosynthetic organism in the seas. It single-handedly accounts for roughly 10 percent of all the carbon that the land and the oceans pull from the atmosphere each year. ...

they demonstrate Prochlorococcus can also form biofilms, sticky communities of cells attached to surfaces. The finding suggests that the tiny organism has another way of life, and one that could play a much larger role in carbon sequestration. "

From the abstract:

"The picocyanobacterium Prochlorococcus is responsible for ~10% of annual marine carbon fixation and plays a role in the global carbon budget.

While these phototrophs are primarily considered free-living and neutrally buoyant in the euphotic zone, we observe that they can form biofilms on diverse substrates. This trait is conserved across Prochlorococcus ecotypes, and populations continuously transition between planktonic and biofilm states via a non-genetic heritable mechanism.

Throughout their growth, cells in biofilms retain a reversible, dynamic attachment state, and measurements of growth, photosynthesis, and carbon exudation rates reveal that cells in biofilms exude more organic carbon than their planktonic counterparts.

Estimates of the fraction of Prochlorococcus cells attached to particles in the ocean—obtained through metagenomic analysis of serially-fractionated samples—reveal that a significant adherent population exists throughout the euphotic and mesopelagic zones.

This work describes a dimension of Prochlorococcus’s ecological niche and suggests a role in carbon export to the deep sea."

The ocean’s most abundant “loner” microbe has a sticky second life | MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology "Researchers in the Chisholm lab find Prochlorococcus can switch between drifting alone and living in attached communities, a discovery that could reshape estimates of how much carbon the ocean moves to the deep sea."

Biofilm formation and dynamics in the marine cyanobacterium Prochlorococcus (open access)

Fig. 1: Biofilms can be established in diverse Prochlorococcus strains through selection.