Salinity is an important abiotic factor controlling the distribution and abundance of Nodularia spumigena, the dominating diazotrophic and toxic phototroph, in the brackish water cyanobacterial blooms of the Baltic Sea. To expand the available genomic information for brackish water cyanobacteria, we sequenced the isolate Nodularia spumigena UHCC 0039 using an Illumina-SMRT hybrid sequencing app...

Diversity and ecological features of cyanobacteria of the genus Nodularia from benthic, periphytic and soil habitats are less well known than those of Nodularia from planktonic habitats. Novel benthic Nodularia strains were isolated from the Baltic Sea and their morphology, the presence of gas vacuoles, nodularin production, gliding, 16S rRNA gene sequences, rpoB, rbcLX and ndaF genes, and gvpA...

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Cyanobacteria of the genus Nodularia form toxic blooms in brackish waters worldwide. In addition, Nodularia spp. are found in benthic, periphytic, and soil habitats. The majority of the planktic isolates produce a pentapeptide hepatotoxin nodularin. We examined the morphologic, toxicologic, and molecular characters of 18 nodularin-producing and nontoxic Nodularia strains to find appropriate mar...

Water blooms formed by potentially toxic species of cyanobacteria are a common phenomenon in the Baltic Sea in late summer. Twenty-five cyanobacterial bloom samples were collected from open and coastal waters of the Baltic Sea during 1985 to 1987, and their toxicity was determined by mouse bioassay. All of 5 bloom samples from the southern Baltic Sea, 6 of 6 from the open northern Baltic Sea (G...

Nodularin is a hepatotoxin produced by the bloom-forming cyanobacterial species Nodularia spumigena. Putative peptide synthetase and polyketide synthase genes were detected in toxic strains of Nodularia by degenerate PCR. Using specific primer sets, peptide synthetase and polyketide synthase gene homologues were detected in nodularin-producing strains indicating a possible role of peptide synth...

In late summer, nitrogen-fixing cyanobacteria Nodularia spumigena and Aphanizomenon flos-aquae form blooms in the open Baltic Sea. N. spumigena has caused several animal poisonings, but Baltic A. flos-aquae is not known to be toxic. In this laboratory study, performed with batch cultures, the influences of environmental conditions on the biomass and nitrogen fixation rate of N. spumigena and A....

The surface ocean absorbs large quantities of the CO2 emitted to the atmosphere from human activities. As this CO2 dissolves in seawater, it reacts to form carbonic acid. While this phenomenon, called ocean acidification, has been found to adversely affect many calcifying organisms, some photosynthetic organisms appear to benefit from increasing [CO2]. Among these is the cyanobacterium Trichode...

We report here the draft genome assembly of the brackish cyanobacterium Nodularia spumigena strain CENA596 isolated from a shrimp production pond in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. The draft genome consists of 291 contigs with a total size of 5,189,679 bp. Secondary metabolite annotations resulted in several predicted gene clusters, including those responsible for encoding the hepatotoxin nodularin.

Nodularia spumigena is a toxic, filamentous cyanobacterium occurring in brackish waters worldwide, yet forms extensive recurrent blooms in the Baltic Sea. N. spumigena produces several classes of non-ribosomal peptides (NRPs) that are active against several key metabolic enzymes. Previously, strains from geographically distant regions showed distinct NRP metabolic profiles. In this work, conspe...