69 research outputs found
Allelopathic and bloom-forming picocyanobacteria in a changing world
Picocyanobacteria are extremely important organisms in the world’s oceans and freshwater ecosystems. They play an essential role in primary production and their domination in phytoplankton biomass is common in both oligotrophic and eutrophic waters. Their role is expected to become even more relevant with the effect of climate change. However, this group of photoautotrophic organisms still remains insufficiently recognized. Only a few works have focused in detail on the occurrence of massive blooms of picocyanobacteria, their toxicity and allelopathic activity. Filling the gap in our knowledge about the mechanisms involved in the proliferation of these organisms could provide a better understanding of aquatic environments. In this review, we gathered and described recent information about allelopathic activity of picocyanobacteria and occurrence of their massive blooms in many aquatic ecosystems. We also examined the relationships between climate change and representative picocyanobacterial genera from freshwater, brackish and marine ecosystems. This work emphasizes the importance of studying the smallest picoplanktonic fractions of cyanobacteria. © 2018 MDPI. All Rights reserved.Acknowledgments: We thank Sabina Jodłowska for execution photographic documentations of Synechococcus sp. strains on electron microscope. This study was supported by BMN grants, Poland, No. 538-G245-B568-17
Assessment of the allelochemical activity and biochemical profile of different phenotypes of picocyanobacteria from the genus synechococcus
Organisms belonging to Synechococcus sp. genera are observed in all freshwater, brackish, and marine waters of the world. They play a relevant role in these ecosystems, since they are one of the main primary producers, especially in open ocean. Eventually, they form mass blooms in coastal areas, which are potentially dangerous for the functioning of marine ecosystems. Allelopathy could be an important factor promoting the proliferation of these organisms. According to the authors’ best knowledge, there is no information on the allelopathic activity and allelopathic compounds exhibited by different Synechococcus sp. phenotypes. Therefore, the research conducted here aimed to study the bioactivity of compounds produced by three phenotypes of Synechococcus sp. by studying their influence on the growth, chlorophyll fluorescence, and photosynthetic pigments of eighteen cyanobacteria and microalgae species. We demonstrated that three different Synechococcus sp. phenotypes, including a phycocyanin (PC)-rich strain (Type 1; green strain) and phycoerythrin (PE)-rich strains containing phycoerythrobilin (PEB) and phycocyanobilin (PCB) (Type 2; red strain and Type 3a; brown strain), had a significant allelopathic effect on the selected species of cyanobacteria, diatoms, and green algae. For all green algae, a decrease in cell abundance under the influence of phenotypes of donor cyanobacteria was shown, whereas, among some target cyanobacteria and diatom species, the cell-free filtrate was observed to have a stimulatory effect. Our estimates of the stress on photosystem II (Fv/Fm) showed a similar pattern, although for some diatoms, there was an effect of stress on photosynthesis, while a stimulatory effect on growth was also displayed. The pigment content was affected by allelopathy in most cases, particularly for chlorophyll a, whilst it was a bit less significant for carotenoids. Our results showed that Synechococcus sp. Type 3a had the strongest effect on target species, while Synechococcus sp. Type 1 had the weakest allelopathic effect. Furthermore, GC-MS analysis produced different biochemical profiles for the Synechococcus strains. For every phenotype, the most abundant compound was different, with oxime-, methoxy-phenyl- being the most abundant substance for Synechococcus Type 1, eicosane for Synechococcus Type 2, and silanediol for Synechococcus Type 3aThis research was founded by BMN grant number 539-O140-B416-20, FCT Projects UIDB/04423/2020and UIDP/04423/2020
Physiological effects on coexisting microalgae of the allelochemicals produced by the bloom-forming cyanobacteria synechococcus sp. And nodularia spumigena
Only a few studies have documented the physiological effects of allelopathy from cyanobacteria against coexisting microalgae. We investigated the allelopathic ability of the bloom-forming cyanobacteria Synechococcus sp. and Nodularia spumigena filtrates on several aspects related to the physiology of the target species: population growth, cell morphology, and several indexes of photosynthesis rate and respiration. The target species were the following: two species of green algae (Oocystis submarina, Chlorella vulgaris) and two species of diatoms (Bacillaria paxillifer, Skeletonema marinoi). These four species coexist in the natural environment with the employed strains of Synechococcus sp. and N. spumigena employed. The tests were performed with single and repeated addition of cyanobacterial cell-free filtrate. We also tested the importance of the growth phase in the strength of the allelopathic effect. The negative effects of both cyanobacteria were the strongest with repeated exudates addition, and generally, Synechococcus sp. and N. spumigena were allelopathic only in the exponential growth phase. O. submarina was not negatively affected by Synechococcus filtrates in any of the parameters studied, while C. vulgaris, B. paxillifer, and S. marinoi were affected in several ways. N. spumigena was characterized by a stronger allelopathic activity than Synechococcus sp., showing a negative effect on all target species. The highest decline in growth, as well as the most apparent cell physical damage, was observed for the diatom S. marinoi. Our findings suggest that cyanobacterial allelochemicals are associated with the cell physical damage, as well as a reduced performance in respiration and photosynthesis system in the studied microalgae which cause the inhibition of the population growth. Moreover, our study has shown that some biotic factors that increase the intensity of allelopathic effects may also alter the ratio between bloom-forming cyanobacteria and some phytoplankton species that occur in the same aquatic ecosystem.This research were funded by BMN grant number 538-G245-B568-17 and FCT Project
UID/Multi/04423/2019. The APC was funded by DS 530-G245-D717-18
Explicit lower and upper bounds on the entangled value of multiplayer XOR games
XOR games are the simplest model in which the nonlocal properties of
entanglement manifest themselves. When there are two players, it is well known
that the bias --- the maximum advantage over random play --- of entangled
players can be at most a constant times greater than that of classical players.
Recently, P\'{e}rez-Garc\'{i}a et al. [Comm. Math. Phys. 279 (2), 2008] showed
that no such bound holds when there are three or more players: the advantage of
entangled players over classical players can become unbounded, and scale with
the number of questions in the game. Their proof relies on non-trivial results
from operator space theory, and gives a non-explicit existence proof, leading
to a game with a very large number of questions and only a loose control over
the local dimension of the players' shared entanglement.
We give a new, simple and explicit (though still probabilistic) construction
of a family of three-player XOR games which achieve a large quantum-classical
gap (QC-gap). This QC-gap is exponentially larger than the one given by
P\'{e}rez-Garc\'{i}a et. al. in terms of the size of the game, achieving a
QC-gap of order with questions per player. In terms of the
dimension of the entangled state required, we achieve the same (optimal) QC-gap
of for a state of local dimension per player. Moreover, the
optimal entangled strategy is very simple, involving observables defined by
tensor products of the Pauli matrices.
Additionally, we give the first upper bound on the maximal QC-gap in terms of
the number of questions per player, showing that our construction is only
quadratically off in that respect. Our results rely on probabilistic estimates
on the norm of random matrices and higher-order tensors which may be of
independent interest.Comment: Major improvements in presentation; results identica
Ecophysiological characteristics of red, green, and brown strains of the Baltic picocyanobacterium <i>Synechococcus</i> sp. – a laboratory study
The contribution of picocyanobacteria (PCY) to summer phytoplankton blooms,
accompanied by an ecological crisis is a new phenomenon in Europe. This issue
requires careful investigation. The present study examined the response of
Synechococcus sp. physiology to different environmental conditions.
Three strains of Synechococcus sp. (red BA-120, green BA-124, and
brown BA-132) were cultivated in a laboratory under previously determined
environmental conditions. These conditions were as follows: temperature (T)
from 10 by 5 to 25 °C, salinity from 3 by 5 to 18 PSU, and
photosynthetically active radiation (PAR) from 10 by 90 to
280 µmol photons m−2 s−1, which gave 64 combinations
of synthetic, though realistic, environmental scenarios. Scenarios reflecting
all possible combinations were applied in the laboratory experiments. Results
pointed to differences in final numbers of cells among strains. However,
there was also a similar tendency for BA-124 and BA-132, which demonstrated
the highest concentrations of PCY cells at elevated T and PAR. This was
also the case for BA-120 but only to a certain degree as the number of cells
started to decrease above
190 µmol photons m−2 s−1 PAR. Pigmentation,
chlorophyll a (Chl a), fluorescence, and rate of photosynthesis presented
both similarities and differences among strains. In this context, more
consistent features were observed between brown and red strains when compared
to the green. In this paper, the ecophysiological responses of PCY are
defined.</p
Remarks on the KLS conjecture and Hardy-type inequalities
We generalize the classical Hardy and Faber-Krahn inequalities to arbitrary
functions on a convex body , not necessarily
vanishing on the boundary . This reduces the study of the
Neumann Poincar\'e constant on to that of the cone and Lebesgue
measures on ; these may be bounded via the curvature of
. A second reduction is obtained to the class of harmonic
functions on . We also study the relation between the Poincar\'e
constant of a log-concave measure and its associated K. Ball body
. In particular, we obtain a simple proof of a conjecture of
Kannan--Lov\'asz--Simonovits for unit-balls of , originally due to
Sodin and Lata{\l}a--Wojtaszczyk.Comment: 18 pages. Numbering of propositions, theorems, etc.. as appeared in
final form in GAFA seminar note
User-friendly tail bounds for sums of random matrices
This paper presents new probability inequalities for sums of independent,
random, self-adjoint matrices. These results place simple and easily verifiable
hypotheses on the summands, and they deliver strong conclusions about the
large-deviation behavior of the maximum eigenvalue of the sum. Tail bounds for
the norm of a sum of random rectangular matrices follow as an immediate
corollary. The proof techniques also yield some information about matrix-valued
martingales.
In other words, this paper provides noncommutative generalizations of the
classical bounds associated with the names Azuma, Bennett, Bernstein, Chernoff,
Hoeffding, and McDiarmid. The matrix inequalities promise the same diversity of
application, ease of use, and strength of conclusion that have made the scalar
inequalities so valuable.Comment: Current paper is the version of record. The material on Freedman's
inequality has been moved to a separate note; other martingale bounds are
described in Caltech ACM Report 2011-0
Transference Principles for Log-Sobolev and Spectral-Gap with Applications to Conservative Spin Systems
We obtain new principles for transferring log-Sobolev and Spectral-Gap
inequalities from a source metric-measure space to a target one, when the
curvature of the target space is bounded from below. As our main application,
we obtain explicit estimates for the log-Sobolev and Spectral-Gap constants of
various conservative spin system models, consisting of non-interacting and
weakly-interacting particles, constrained to conserve the mean-spin. When the
self-interaction is a perturbation of a strongly convex potential, this
partially recovers and partially extends previous results of Caputo,
Chafa\"{\i}, Grunewald, Landim, Lu, Menz, Otto, Panizo, Villani, Westdickenberg
and Yau. When the self-interaction is only assumed to be (non-strongly) convex,
as in the case of the two-sided exponential measure, we obtain sharp estimates
on the system's spectral-gap as a function of the mean-spin, independently of
the size of the system.Comment: 57 page
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