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Tag Archives: bloom

The pan-genome of Emiliania huxleyi

28 Friday Jun 2013

Posted by sedeer in Genetics, Microbiology

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Tags

algae, biology, bloom, Ehux, Emiliania huxleyi, Genome, Popular science, science, Species, White Cliffs of Dover

Under certain conditions, Emiliania huxleyi can form massive blooms which can be detected by satellite remote sensing. What looks like clouds in the water, is in fact the reflected light from billions of coccoliths floating in the water-column. Landsat image from 24th July 1999, courtesy of Steve Groom, Plymouth Marine Laboratory. This bloom attracted considerable coverage in the UK media. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)Emiliania huxleyi has more going for it than just a beautiful name. Despite being only a few millionths of a millimeter in size — about a tenth of the thickness of a human hair — this unicellular alga has a major impact on our planet. Blooms of E. huxleyi, which can cover more than 100,000 square kilometres of ocean, are visible from space and affect the global climate; the concerted impact of all the cells in the bloom influences carbon and sulphur cycles and even changes how much light the Earth reflects. Under an electron microscope, E. huxleyi cells reveal their striking, alien beauty; encased in tiny plates called coccoliths, they look like strange spaceships or escape pods. E. huxleyi lives throughout the world’s oceans, from the warm tropics to the subarctic seas, and these plates underlie its remarkable impact on the planet’s climate and geology.
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