Abstract
In coastal zones, salinity is commonly a rather local environmental factor that can be highly variable. Future climate change scenarios indicate for many coastal regions besides warming also changes in current salinity regime due to less precipitation, higher evaporation, or more freshwater run-off, resulting in decreasing or increasing saline conditions. The soft bottom of shallow water coastal zones is typically inhabited by benthic diatoms which cover as photosynthetic biofilms extensive areas of sediments. Cylindrotheca closterium is a cosmopolitan and abundant taxon of such communities, and is widely used as a benthic diatom model system. Nevertheless, comprehensive ecophysiological data on the salinity tolerance of this ecologically important benthic species are still missing. Therefore, the main goal was to investigate the salinity tolerance in 6 strains of C. closterium from 5 different clades and from marine to brackish habitats. An analysis of growth as function of salinity allowed the evaluation of tolerance limits, growth optima, and acclimation abilities of individual strains. The data documented isolate-specific growth response patterns and rather broad tolerance widths among the six strains of C. closterium, which point to strong genotypic differentiation. The results of the phylogenetic network analysis indicate several well separated grades within C. closterium, thereby supporting the earlier suggestion of a cryptic species complex.
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Acknowledgments
The authors gratefully acknowledge the provision of diatom strains by J. Woelfel, B. Vanelslander, and I. Moreno-Garrido. We are grateful to F. Rüdiger who performed part of the ecophysiological experiments. The work on the Spitsbergen isolate has been performed at the Ny-Ålesund International Arctic Environmental Research and Monitoring Facility and under the agreement on scientific cooperation between the Alfred Wegener Institute and the University of Rostock. The authors thank the crew at the AWIPEV-base in Ny-Ålesund and the German dive team (Anita Flohr, Peter Leopold, Max Schwanitz) for assistance in the field, sample collection, and further support, as well as Juliane Müller for maintaining the stock collection of Arctic benthic diatoms at the University of Rostock.
Funding
The research of K. Glaser was funded by the DFG priority program 1991 “Taxonomics” (GL 909/1-1, K.G.), that of U. Karsten by the DFG priority program 1158 “Antarctic Research” (DFG, KA899/12, KA899/15).
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Glaser, K., Karsten, U. Salinity tolerance in biogeographically different strains of the marine benthic diatom Cylindrotheca closterium (Bacillariophyceae). J Appl Phycol 32, 3809–3816 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10811-020-02238-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10811-020-02238-6