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posted 02. March 2006 18:48
Source: PLoS Biology
A Stress Surveillance System Based on Calcium and Nitric Oxide in Marine Diatoms
Assaf Vardi, Fabio Formiggini, Raffaella Casotti, Alessandra De Martino, François Ribalet, Antonio Miralto, Chris Bowler
Introduction
Diatoms are major components of phytoplankton blooms in aquatic ecosystems and are central in the biogeochemical cycling of important nutrients such as carbon, nitrogen, and silicon. Unraveling the factors that regulate the fate of blooms is therefore of great importance. During a bloom succession, phytoplankton are thought to utilize chemical signals to enhance their defense capacities against grazers and pathogens, and for outcompeting other phytoplankton for available resources. The evolutionary and ecological success of diatoms in the contemporary oceans might suggest that they utilize sophisticated mechanisms to monitor and adapt appropriately to changing environmental conditions. Indeed, previous reports have implicated the role of a chemical defense based on diatom-derived aldehyde products of fatty-acid oxidation, which impair the normal development of grazers such as copepods and other invertebrates^. Furthermore, it has now emerged that these same aldehydes are toxic to the diatoms themselves and can trigger a process bearing the hallmarks of programmed cell death^. We therefore explored the hypothesis that they may function as infochemicals^ in the marine environment, and so we investigated how diatoms perceive and respond to diatom-derived antiproliferative aldehydes such as (2E,4E/Z)-decadienal (DD). DD was chosen as a model aldehyde because its reactive properties are currently being tested on various animal, plant, and unicellular systems.
(Note: Several footnotes removed for readability. See the original article for footnotes.)
Academic Editor: Jeffrey Dangl, University of North Carolina, United States of America
Received: August 8, 2005; Accepted: December 27, 2005; Published: February 21, 2006
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.0040060
Copyright: © 2006 Vardi et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
[Emphases added by ISCID News Editor]
[Link-underlined terms with ^ indicate linked entry in ISCID Encyclopedia of Science and Philosophy as added by ISCID News Editor]
Read the full research article at PLoS Biology
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