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Applied and Environmental Microbiology, January 2006, p. 723-732, Vol. 72, No. 1
0099-2240/06/$08.00+0     doi:10.1128/AEM.72.1.723-732.2006
Copyright © 2006, American Society for Microbiology. All Rights Reserved.

Prochlorococcus Ecotype Abundances in the North Atlantic Ocean As Revealed by an Improved Quantitative PCR Method{dagger}

Erik R. Zinser,1,{ddagger} Allison Coe,1 Zackary I. Johnson,1,§ Adam C. Martiny,1 Nicholas J. Fuller,2 David J. Scanlan,2 and Sallie W. Chisholm1*

Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139,1 Department of Biological Sciences, University of Warwick, Gibbet Hill Rd., Coventry CV4 7AL, United Kingdom2

Received 9 May 2005/ Accepted 17 September 2005

The cyanobacterium Prochlorococcus numerically dominates the photosynthetic community in the tropical and subtropical regions of the world's oceans. Six evolutionary lineages of Prochlorococcus have been described, and their distinctive physiologies and genomes indicate that these lineages are "ecotypes" and should have different oceanic distributions. Two methods recently developed to quantify these ecotypes in the field, probe hybridization and quantitative PCR (QPCR), have shown that this is indeed the case. To facilitate a global investigation of these ecotypes, we modified our QPCR protocol to significantly increase its speed, sensitivity, and accessibility and validated the method in the western and eastern North Atlantic Ocean. We showed that all six ecotypes had distinct distributions that varied with depth and location, and, with the exception of the deeper waters at the western North Atlantic site, the total Prochlorococcus counts determined by QPCR matched the total counts measured by flow cytometry. Clone library analyses of the deeper western North Atlantic waters revealed ecotypes that are not represented in the culture collections with which the QPCR primers were designed, explaining this discrepancy. Finally, similar patterns of relative ecotype abundance were obtained in QPCR and probe hybridization analyses of the same field samples, which could allow comparisons between studies.

* Corresponding author. Mailing address: 48-419 MIT, Cambridge, MA 02139. Phone: (617) 253-1771. Fax: (617) 324-0336. E-mail: chisholm{at}mit.edu

{dagger} AMT contribution no. 108.

{ddagger} Present address: University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN 37996.

§ Present address: University of Hawaii, Honolulu, HI 96822.

Applied and Environmental Microbiology, January 2006, p. 723-732, Vol. 72, No. 1
0099-2240/06/$08.00+0     doi:10.1128/AEM.72.1.723-732.2006
Copyright © 2006, American Society for Microbiology. All Rights Reserved.



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