School of Biological Sciences, Victoria University of Wellington, PO Box 600, Wellington 6140, New Zealand.
Environ Microbiol Rep. 2012 Oct;4(5):479-83. doi: 10.1111/j.1758-2229.2012.00346.x. Epub 2012 Apr 26.
Cyanobacteria play an important role in the primary productivity of many ecosystems and are dominant in non-marine polar environments. Apart from detecting low levels of cyanobacteria-like pigments in the Southern Ocean, little effort has been spent in trying to elucidate Cyanobacteria in Antarctic sea ice. Here, we report the first use of culture, microscope, microarray and molecular techniques to show that marine Cyanobacteria are rare or absent in sea ice. Our infrequent positive signals were most closely related to freshwater Cyanobacteria from neighbouring terrestrial sources, which illustrates our techniques were sensitive enough to find sea-ice cyanobacteria if they were present. It is still possible that minute quantity of marine cyanobacteria may exist in sea ice and do not contribute significantly to the polar marine ecosystems.
蓝藻在许多生态系统的初级生产力中起着重要作用，并且在非海洋极地环境中占主导地位。除了在南大洋检测到低水平的类似蓝藻色素外，人们几乎没有努力试图阐明南极海冰中的蓝藻。在这里，我们首次报告使用培养、显微镜、微阵列和分子技术来表明海洋蓝藻在海冰中很少或不存在。我们偶尔出现的阳性信号与来自附近陆地来源的淡水蓝藻最为密切相关，这表明我们的技术足够灵敏，如果存在海冰蓝藻，就能够发现它们。海洋蓝藻的微量可能确实存在于海冰中，但对极地海洋生态系统没有显著贡献。
