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Morphological and molecular discrimination of green macroalgae Chaetomorpha aerea and C. linum

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Abstract

Green macroalgae Chaetomorpha aerea and C. linum are taxonomically confused. In this paper, we tried morphological and molecular analyses to separate these two species. C. aerea and C. linum can be distinguished from morphological characteritics, such as frond dimension, cells size and shape, their mean length/width ratios (LWR), and cell walls constriction. Thalli of C. aerea attenuate basipetally, with diameter 270–500 μm at upper portion, 160–360 μm at middle portion, 100–160 μm at basal portion. For the upper part, the length of cells is less than their diameter. Cell walls usually constrict at the dissepiments, which are pellucid or colorless and give the filament beaded appearance. In contrast, thalli of C. linum often have a constant diameter of 90–300 μm within the same individual, cell walls usually do not constrict and cells are cylindrical or barrel shaped. The LWR is larger than that of C. aerea. Results show that the pairwise distance between two species is 3.6%–3.7% for 18S rRNA gene and 53.5%–54.3% for ITS region. In phylogeny, they distribute at distant clades, which confirms a genetic divergence at molecular level. In addition, morphological data indicates that filament diameter of C. linum samples is highly variable, ranging from 90 μm to 300 μm. Then these two species can be considered as separate species.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Tianjin Key Laboratory of Animal and Plant Resistance, College of Life Sciences, Tianjin Normal University, Tianjin, 300387, China

    Bingxin Huang & Lanping Ding

  2. Institute of Oceanology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Qingdao, 266071, China

    Bingxin Huang, Linhong Teng & Lanping Ding

  3. Graduate University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100049, China

    Linhong Teng

  4. Marine Biology Institute, Shantou University, Shantou, 515063, China

    Bingxin Huang & Lanping Ding

Authors
  1. Bingxin Huang
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  2. Linhong Teng
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  3. Lanping Ding
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Correspondence to Lanping Ding.

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Foundation item: The National Key Technology R&D Program of China under contract No. 2012BAC07B05; the National Natural Science Foundation of China under contract Nos 31400186, 31270257 and 31093440; the Science and Technology Plan Project of Guangdong Province under contract No. 2012A020200007; the Science and Technology Plan Project of Shantou City, China under contract No. 2012–171.

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Huang, B., Teng, L. & Ding, L. Morphological and molecular discrimination of green macroalgae Chaetomorpha aerea and C. linum . Acta Oceanol. Sin. 35, 118–123 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13131-016-0841-x

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13131-016-0841-x

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