Select References

Here are a few papers to introduce the microbes potentially carrying out photoheterotrophy.

Béjà, O. and others. 2000. Bacterial rhodopsin: Evidence for a new type of phototrophy in the sea. Science 289: 1902-1906.

This is the first paper reporting proteorhodopsin in the open ocean.

Cottrell, M. T., A. Mannino, and D. L. Kirchman. 2006. Aerobic anoxygenic phototrophic bacteria in the Mid-Atlantic Bight and the North Pacific Gyre. Appl. Environ. Microbiol. 72:557-564.

This is the first paper to compare the abundance of AAP bacteria to other groups of bacteria and to estimate amounts of bacteriochlorophyll per cell, which is one measure of the importance of phototrophy to these microbes. One of the main conclusions was that the abundance of AAP bacteria is comparable to other types of bacteria known to be important in DOM cycling.

Church, M. J., H. W. Ducklow, and D. M. Karl. 2004. Light dependence of [ 3H]leucine incorporation in the oligotrophic North Pacific Ocean. Appl. Environ. Microbiol. 70: 4079-4087.

This paper provides evidence that light affects bacterial production and suggests that the light effect is mainly due to Prochlorococcus.

Koblizek, M., M. Masin, J. Ras, A. J. Poulton, and O. Prasil. 2007. Rapid growth rates of aerobic anoxygenic phototrophs in the ocean. Environ. Microbiol. 9:2401-2406.

Variation in bacteriochlorophyll concentrations over the diel cycle indicated that AAP bacterial growth rates are substantionally higher than those for the entire prokaryotic community. One of the main strengths of this approach is that the growth rates were estimated without incubating the microbes in bottles.

Kolber, Z. S., C. L. Van Dover, R. A. Niederman, and P. G. Falkowski. 2000. Bacterial photosynthesis in surface waters of the open ocean. Nature 407: 177-179.

This is the first paper reporting AAP bacteria in the open ocean.

Martinez, A., A. S. Bradley, J. R. Waldbauer, R. E. Summons, and E. F. DeLong. 2007. Proteorhodopsin photosystem gene expression enables photophosphorylation in a heterologous host. 104:5590-5595.

This paper demonstrated that a proteorhodopsin gene complex is capable of generating ATP with light energy when the genes are expressed in E. coli.

Sieracki, M. E., I. C. Gilg, E. C. Thier, N. J. Poulton, and R. Goericke. 2006. Distribution of planktonic aerobic anoxygenic photoheterotrophic bacteria in the northwest Atlantic. Limnol. Oceanogr. 51:38-46.

Microscopic examination revealed that the cell size of AAP bacteria is larger than other prokaryotes in the North Atlantic Ocean.

Venter, J. C. and others. 2004. Environmental genome shotgun sequencing of the Sargasso Sea. Science 304: 66-74.

The metagenome of the Sargasso Sea has yielded many important observations, but perhaps the most important is the diversity of proteorhodopsins among bacteria.

 

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