Whole community metatranscriptomes and lipidomes reveal diverse responses among antarctic phytoplankton to changing ice conditions

• Published in: Frontiers in Marine Science
• Main Authors: Bowman, Jeff S., Van Mooy, Benjamin A. S., Lowenstein, Daniel P., Fredricks, Helen F., Hansel, Colleen M., Gast, Rebecca J., Collins, James R., Couto, Nicole, Ducklow, Hugh W.
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: unknown
• Published: Frontiers Media 2021
• Subjects: Antarctica; phytoplankton; lipids; metatranscriptomics; Palmer LTER project; Antarctic; The Antarctic; Antarctic Peninsula; Palmer Station; Palmer-Station; Arthur Harbor; Antarc*; Sea ice
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/1912/27076

© The Author(s), 2021 This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in Bowman, J. S., Van Mooy, B. A. S., Lowenstein, D. P., Fredricks, H. F., Hansel, C. M., Gast, R., Collins, J. R., Couto, N., & Ducklow, H. W. Whole community metatranscriptomes and lipidomes reveal diverse responses among antarctic phytoplankton to changing ice conditions. Frontiers in Marine Science, 8,(2021): 593566, https://doi.org/10.3389/fmars.2021.593566. The transition from winter to spring represents a major shift in the basal energy source for the Antarctic marine ecosystem from lipids and other sources of stored energy to sunlight. Because sea ice imposes a strong control on the transmission of sunlight into the water column during the polar spring, we hypothesized that the timing of the sea ice retreat influences the timing of the transition from stored energy to photosynthesis. To test the influence of sea ice on water column microbial energy utilization we took advantage of unique sea ice conditions in Arthur Harbor, an embayment near Palmer Station on the western Antarctic Peninsula, during the 2015 spring–summer seasonal transition. Over a 5-week period we sampled water from below land-fast sea ice, in the marginal ice zone at nearby Palmer Station B, and conducted an ice removal experiment with incubations of water collected below the land-fast ice. Whole-community metatranscriptomes were paired with lipidomics to better understand how lipid production and utilization was influenced by light conditions. We identified several different phytoplankton taxa that responded similarly to light by the number of genes up-regulated, and in the transcriptional complexity of this response. We applied a principal components analysis to these data to reduce their dimensionality, revealing that each of these taxa exhibited a strikingly different pattern of gene up-regulation. By correlating the changes in lipid concentration to the first principal component ...