Eutrophication and warming are key drivers of cyanobacterial blooms, but their combined effects on microcystin (MC) concentrations are less studied. We tested the hypothesis that warming promotes cyanobacterial abundance in a natural plankton community and that eutrophication enhances cyanobacterial biomass and MC concentrations. We incubated natural seston from a eutrophic pond under normal, h...

In this study, we used 454-pyrosequencing to report the highly diverse diazotroph communities in the Kuroshio and its adjacent waters along a transect across the Tokara Strait, Japan. Terrestrial input from the islands resulted in a highly heterogeneous diazotroph community within a relatively small geographic region, which was presumably caused by the remarkably different responses of UCYN-A2,...

BACKGROUND The incidence of liver cancer has been increasing in Canada over the past decade, as has cyanobacterial contamination of Canadian freshwater lakes and drinking water sources. Cyanotoxins released by cyanobacteria have been implicated in the pathogenesis of liver cancer. OBJECTIVE To determine whether a geographic association exists between liver cancer and surrogate markers of cyan...

Cyanobacteria are one of the main components of the microbiota in rice paddy fields and significantly contribute to its fertilization. The diversity and changes of the cyanobacterial assemblage were investigated during a rice growth season and after harvest in a paddy field located in Fujian Province, China. The cyanobacterial populations were analyzed by a semi-nested PCR, followed by denaturi...

Cyanobacteria forged two major evolutionary transitions with the invention of oxygenic photosynthesis and the bestowal of photosynthetic lifestyle upon eukaryotes through endosymbiosis. Information germane to understanding those transitions is imprinted in cyanobacterial genomes, but deciphering it is complicated by lateral gene transfer (LGT). Here, we report genome sequences for the morpholog...

Photosystem II (PSII) contains different extrinsic proteins required for oxygen evolution among different organisms. Cyanobacterial PSII contains the 33 kDa, 12 kDa proteins and cytochrome (cyt) c-550; red algal PSII contains a 20 kDa protein in addition to the three homologous cyanobacterial proteins; whereas higher plant PSII contains the 33 kDa, 23 kDa and 17 kDa proteins. In order to unders...

Cyanobacteria hold significant potential as industrial biotechnology (IB) platforms for the production of a wide variety of bio-products ranging from biofuels such as hydrogen, alcohols and isoprenoids, to high-value bioactive and recombinant proteins. Underpinning this technology, are the recent advances in cyanobacterial "omics" research, the development of improved genetic engineering tools ...

Argimicin A is a potent anti-cyanobacterial compound produced by one of algae-lysing bacteria, Sphingomonas sp. M-17. Since the compound seemed to exhibit selective activities against cyanobacteria and such selectivity were considered to be quite rare, the mode of action of argimicin A was investigated. Argimicin A showed a unique delayed action, i.e., the cyanobacterial cell division continued...

Self-splicing group I introns in tRNA anticodon loops have been found in diverse groups of bacteria (alpha, beta purple bacteria and cyanobacteria). In particular, the cyanobacterial tRNA(Leu)(UAA) group I introns have attracted considerable attention because of their presumed ancient origin and immobility. In this work, however, we identified tRNA(Leu)(UAA) group I introns in six out of 16 clo...

This study investigated the diversity of cyanobacterial mat communities of three meltwater ponds--Fresh, Orange and Salt Ponds, south of Bratina Island, McMurdo Ice Shelf, Antarctica. A combined morphological and genetic approach using clone libraries was used to investigate the influence of salinity on cyanobacterial diversity within these ecosystems without prior cultivation or isolation of c...