Seawater mesocosm experiments in the Arctic uncover differential transfer of marine bacteria to aerosols

• Published in: Environmental Microbiology Reports
• Main Authors: Fahlgren, Camilla, Gómez-Consarnau, Laura, Zábori, Julia, Lindh, Markus V., Krejci, Radovan, Mårtensson, E. Monica, Nilsson, Douglas, Pinhassi, Jarone
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: unknown
• Published: Society for Applied Microbiology 2015
• Subjects: Arctic; Arctic Ocean; Svalbard; Kongsfjord*; Kongsfjorden; Phytoplankton
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10261/117505; https://doi.org/10.1111/1758-2229.12273

11 pages, 3 figures, 2 tables, supporting information http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1758-2229.12273/suppinfo Biogenic aerosols critically control atmospheric processes. However, although bacteria constitute major portions of living matter in seawater, bacterial aerosolization from oceanic surface layers remains poorly understood. We analysed bacterial diversity in seawater and experimentally generated aerosols from three Kongsfjorden sites, Svalbard. Construction of 16S rRNA gene clone libraries from paired seawater and aerosol samples resulted in 1294 sequences clustering into 149 bacterial and 34 phytoplankton operational taxonomic units (OTUs). Bacterial communities in aerosols differed greatly from corresponding seawater communities in three out of four experiments. Dominant populations of both seawater and aerosols were Flavobacteriia, Alphaproteobacteria and Gammaproteobacteria. Across the entire dataset, most OTUs from seawater could also be found in aerosols; in each experiment, however, several OTUs were either selectively enriched in aerosols or little aerosolized. Notably, a SAR11 clade OTU was consistently abundant in the seawater, but was recorded in significantly lower proportions in aerosols. A strikingly high proportion of colony-forming bacteria were pigmented in aerosols compared with seawater, suggesting that selection during aerosolization contributes to explaining elevated proportions of pigmented bacteria frequently observed in atmospheric samples. Our findings imply that atmospheric processes could be considerably influenced by spatiotemporal variations in the aerosolization efficiency of different marine bacteria. © 2015 Society for Applied Microbiology and John Wiley & Sons Ltd. This experimental work was part of the interdisciplinary climate project GRACE (GReenhouse Arctic ocean and Climate Effects of aerosols) financed by the Swedish Research Council (VR; contract no 2007-8362), and a collaboration between four departments at Stockholm University and the Linnaeus ...