Trends in Plant Science
ReviewThe effect of water motion on short-term rates of photosynthesis by marine phytoplankton
Section snippets
Environmental control of photosynthetic processes
By definition, phytoplankton are incapable of sustained directional movement and therefore are subject to the environmental conditions in their parent body of water. Photosynthesis is responsive to changes in nutrient availability on short timescales2 but in marine systems the changes are more likely to occur over relatively long timescales (days to seasons). Although nutrient availability is critical for determining population dynamics3 and the ultimate determinant of the geographic abundance
Kinetic models and the time-dependence of photosynthetic physiology
Short-term variability in photosynthetic rates can be accounted for in productivity models using time-dependent relationships. Generally, two assumptions are made, namely that the ocean can be considered as a one-dimensional system in the vertical and (in many models) that the time-dependence of photosynthetic processes follow first-order reaction kinetics. With an adequate understanding of the vertical variation in mixing rate, the trajectories of groups of cells can be described by a random
The future
It is now possible to evaluate how the photosynthetic apparatus is regulated under complex environmental forcing. The complexity of the environment–photosynthesis relationship is tractable using the notion of energy-balance regulation: the redox state of the light reactions is a universal signal in micro-algae for regulating cellular light harvesting efficiency. The success of recent pigment-photoacclimation models that incorporate an energy-balance regulatory ‘signal’ based on the redox state,
Acknowledgements
We thank two anonymous reviewers for their comments on the manuscript. This work was supported by Grants OCE-9730098 and OCE-9633633 from the National Science Foundation (USA) and is contribution No. 3239 from Horn Point Laboratory.
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