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Protistology ■ 33
of chlorophylls. A phototrophic euglenoid Euglena gracilis exhibited that chloroplasts underwent dismantled when incubated in the dark, leaving brown-colored granules. The brown granules were massive structures of membranes generated after degraded thylakoids. Chlorophylls are converted to CPEs in an early stage of dismantling, and proteins were removed during the dismantling. Macroautophagy of chloroplasts was not apparent, and the dismantling chloroplasts seem not to undergo acidification; instead, large acidic vacuoles commonly formed beside the dismantling chloroplasts. This would be comparable to digestion of chloroplasts by phycophagic euglenoids, where also accumulated CPEs. However, the digestive degradation proceeds within acidified phagosome hence being apparently non-homologous to the dismantlement in the phototrophs. We infer that the CPE-metabolism, which has not been reported for green algae, might have been inherited from ancestral heterotrophs to phototrophs, and is now adapted into a novel mechanism to dismantle the secondary chloroplasts.
COMPARISON OF FRESH WATER CILIATED PROTIST COMMUNITIES FROM TWO LOCATIONS ALONG NAJAFGARH DRAIN, DELHI, INDIA, AND THEIR CORRELATION WITH PHYSIO-CHEMICAL PARAMETERS Kaur Harpreet1, Rani Pooja2, Kaur Surinder1, Narula Laxmi1, Kamra Komal1, Lal Rup2, Warren Alan3
1 - Ciliate Biology Lab, SGTB Khalsa College, University of Delhi, Delhi 110007
2 - Department of Zoology, University of Delhi, Delhi 110007
3 - Natural History Museum, London, SW75BD, UK komalkamra@gmail.com
There are 18 sewage drains traversing the National Capital Region (NCR) of Delhi, India, that flow into the River Yamuna. Najafgarh Drain is the largest with a catchment area of around 400 km2. It picks up domestic and industrial wastes from 38 secondary drains coming from over 2/3 of the city. It carries a total flow of over 2100 million litres per day ofwhich 30% is treated. Sewage treatment plants and effluent treatment plants discharging into the drain are inadequate and not working to full capacity. Ciliated protist communities were assessed (with appropriate morphological, morphometric and morphogenetic descriptions) at two locations along the drain: the mid-point of the drain (D1) and at the end of the drain before it empties into the river Yamuna (D2). Various physico-chemical parameters were also
measured. Sampling was carried out weekly for 3 weeks during the pre-mon-soon season. Compared to D1, substantially higher levels of free CO2, chloride, phosphates and hardness were observed in D2 indicating the water here is more polluted. The ciliate communities at the two sites differed significantly. The results of detailed analyses, showing correlations between physico-chemical parameters (including heavy metals), and ciliate communities, will be presented. The significance of such data collected over a period of time along the drains, the river, and at water treatment plants, shall benefit ecologists in developing strategies to help mitigate river pollution as ciliates are known to clarify waste water and act as bio-indicators of specific pollutants.
OLIGOTROPHIC LAGOONS OF THE SOUTH PACIFIC OCEAN ARE HOME TO A SURPRISING NUMBER OF NOVEL EUKARYOTIC MICROORGANISMS
Kim E.1, Sprung B.2, Duhamel S.3, Filardi C.1, Shin M.4
1 - American Museum of Natural History
2 - University of Pennsylvania
3 - Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Columbia University
4 - University of Ulsan ekim1@amnh.org
The diversity of microbial eukaryotes was surveyed by metagenomic sequencing from tropical lagoon sites of the South Pacific, collected through the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH)'s Explore21 expedition to the Solomon Islands in September 2013. The sampled lagoons presented low nutrient concentrations typical of oligotrophic waters, but contained levels of chlorophyll a, a proxy for phytoplankton biomass, characteristic of meso- to eutrophic waters. Two 18S rDNA sites that include the V4 and V8-V9 regions were amplified from the total ofeight lagoon samples and sequenced on the MiSeq system. After assembly, clustering at 97% similarity, and removal of singletons and chimeras, a total of 2,741 (V4) and 2,606 (V8-V9) operational taxonomic units (OTUs) were identified. Taxonomic annotation of these reads, including phylogeny, was based on a combination of automated pipeline and manual inspection. 18.4% (V4) and 13.8% (V8-V9) of the OTUs could not be assigned to any of the known eukaryotic groups. Of these, we focused on OTUs that were not divergent and possessed multiple sources of evidence for their existence. Phylogenetic analyses of these sequences revealed more than ten branches that
