Research Highlights
NCMIR's Telescience is featured in Science Grid This Week
Tiffany Moisan of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center at Wallops Island Virgina teamed up with NCMIR researchers to investigate the morphological changes associated with a marine alga, Phaeocystis antarctica, grown in light-limiting and high light environments. Their study, reported in the journal Marine Biology, presents the first 3D structures determined by electron tomography of an ecologically important phytoplankton species. By using electron tomography—capable of characterizing sections ten times thicker than those used in transmission electron microscopy—the researchers suggest a new perspective on the complex interactions between the alga’s thylakoid membranes, the pyrenoid, and the chloroplast membrane. The ability to resolve chloroplast structures in three dimensions allowed the team to characterize the dynamic response of P. antarctica at the subcellular level to changes in light intensity.
Characterizing how the subcellular structure of a phytoplankton contributes to its ecological fitness under environmentally variable light levels has profound implications for photophysiology and is an important step in bridging the gap between processes operating at the cellular and ecosystem levels.
Data acquired in this chloroplast study are publicly available through the Cell Centered Database, an online resource for 3D light and electron microscopic data. This observed 3D thylakoid structures have profound implications for cellular photophysiology and making the data publicly availalbe will benefit future computational analyses and perhaps optical models of light absorption by phytoplankton in the marine environment.