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Abstract
Ota S., Silver T.D., Archibald J.M. and Ishida K. 2009. Lotharella oceanica sp. nov. – a new planktonic chlorarachniophyte studied by light and electron microscopy. Phycologia 48: 315–323. DOI: 10.2216/09-02.1.
A new chlorarachniophyte alga, Lotharella oceanica sp. nov., is described. This alga is the fifth named species in the genus Lotharella and has naked (wall-less) spherical cells as its vegetative stage. Swimming cells (zoospores) with a single flagellum were also observed in the organism's life cycle, although cell division appears not to occur in the swimming stage. Lotharella oceanica was collected and isolated from open ocean water in the Sargasso Sea and maintained as strain CCMP622 at the Provasoli-Guillard National Center for Culture of Marine Phytoplankton, the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences, USA. CCMP622 was originally described as a strain of Bigelowiella natans, one of the planktonic chlorarachniophytes. However, the original description of B. natans clearly showed that this isolate (strain CCMP622) possesses a deep-slit type of pyrenoid, which is a diagnostic character for members of the genus Lotharella, Moreover, in a previously published phylogenetic study of the chlorarachniophytes including CCMP622, it was suggested that this strain could represent a new species of Lotharella; its taxonomy thus became uncertain. We have studied the morphology, life cycle and ultrastructure of strain CCMP622 to clarify its taxonomic position and demonstrate that this isolate does not belong to the genus Bigelowiella but rather belongs to Lotharella. We thus describe it as Lotharella oceanica sp. nov.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We thank Dr Daniel Vaulot (Station Biologique de Roscoff), Prof. David G. Mann (Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh) and two reviewers for helpful comments on this manuscript. S.O. thanks the French government for a research fellowship support ‘bourse de stage’. Research in the Archibald lab was supported by an operating grant from the Canadian Institutes for Health Research (CIHR). T.D.S. was supported by a student fellowship from the Nova Scotia Health Research Foundation. J.M.A is a CIHR new investigator and a scholar of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, Program in Integrated Microbial Biodiversity. K.I. thanks the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology of Japan for a Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (no. 18570084).