Podcasts about Prochlorococcus

Matters Microbial #63: A Symphony of Cyanobacteria October 30, 2024 Today, Dr. Nathan Algren, Associate Professor of Biology at Clark University, joins the #QualityQuorum to discuss the centrality of cyanobacteria to our biosphere, the viruses that prey upon them, and his interests in outreach and science-oriented art. Host: Mark O. Martin Guest: Nathan Ahlgren Subscribe: Apple Podcasts, Spotify Become a patron of Matters Microbial! Links for this episode An overview of the cyanobacteria. An overview of Prochlorococcus. An overview of marine bacteriophages. The Great Oxidation Event Cyanobacteria are thought to have radically changed our planet 2.5-3.5 billion years ago by producing oxygen through photosynthesis. In essence, they and other microbes are the original terraformers. The Purple Earth Hypothesis Photosynthesis as we know it, using chlorophyll, may have evolved after another way of doing photosynthesis, with retinal that looks purple. This means that our planets and other ‘younger' planets may look or have looked purple rather than green. Self-assembly of viral capsids, as modeled by 3D-printed parts (Art Olson) TED talk from Penny Chisholm on Prochlorococcus Co-occurring Synechococcus ecotypes occupy four major oceanic regimes defined by temperature, macronutrients and iron  Study showing how different populations of Synechococcus occupy different niches and regions of the oceans according to their adaptations to temperature and nutrients. Long-term stability and Red Queen-like strain dynamics in marine viruses  Study showing turnover of strains within relatively stable phage populations. Viral treadmills in the ocean—running to stand still  Companion ‘behind the paper' article. Diverse Marine T4-like Cyanophage Communities Are Primarily Comprised of Low-Abundance Species Including Species with Distinct Seasonal, Persistent, Occasional, or Sporadic Dynamics  Paper showing cyanophage ‘species' have different time patterns in the oceans. Rapid diversification of coevolving marine Synechococcus and a virus Study showing stable co-existence and co-evolution of a single Synechococcus host and phage over time. The emergence of resistance hosts and phage that overcome them demonstrate the principles of the Red Queen hypothesis and phage-host ‘arms race'. Present and future global distributions of the marine Cyanobacteria Prochlorococcus and Synechococcus Figure from this paper is in the presentation. Shows modeled distributions of Pro and Syn across the globe. They also use this to estimate a ~25% contribution of Pro and Syn to global net primary productivity in the oceans. Link to 3D prints that Dr. Ahlgren made an are available on NIH page Some resources on how to 3D protein structures: I like this guide on the practical guide of how to do actually to do it (going from PDB to print files): A link to another resource for 3D printing of protein structures. Dr. Ahlgren's faculty website. Dr. Ahlgren's laboratory website with many fascinating links. Intro music is by Reber Clark Send your questions and comments to mattersmicrobial@gmail.com

Matters Microbial #56: Marine Microbial Echoes of Evolution September 11, 2024 Today, Dr. Carolina Martinez Gutierrez of the Department of Earth Science at the University of California Santa Barbara joins the #QualityQuorum to discuss her research team's efforts to unravel how ancient microbes thrived in the early oceans of Earth's history . . . and to sing the praises of marine microbiology! Host: Mark O. Martin Guest: Carolina Martinez Gutierrez Subscribe: Apple Podcasts, Spotify Become a patron of Matters Microbial! Links for this episode An overview of the microbiome of the ocean and geochemistry. A description of likely conditions on Ancient Earth. An essay about the Great Oxidation Event—the event that changed our entire planet. An article by Dr. Martinez Gutierrez and colleagues discussing how phylogenomics can help dissect microbial evolution without fossils. An overview of Prochlorococcus, one of the microbes Dr. Martinez Gutierrez discussed. A wonderful video about Prochlorococcus and a remarkable scientist. An overview of Pelagibacteri ubique (SAR11), one of the microbes Dr. Martinez Gutierrez discussed. An article about the work of Dr. Martinez Gutierrez and her research interests while a postdoctoral scholar The departmental website for Dr. Martinez Gutierrez The laboratory website for Dr. Martinez Gutierrez's research group. Intro music is by Reber Clark Send your questions and comments to mattersmicrobial@gmail.com

Dans cet épisode de C&C, Noemie et Jessica discutent d'une disparition suspicieuse en mer et du futur de nos océans. Sources pour cet épisode : .https://hakaimagazine.com/features/mysterious-disappearance-keith-davis/ ,https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-62603911 ,https://revealnews.org/article/he-was-supposed-to-protect-the-sea-then-he-vanished-from-his-ship/ , https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/may/22/disappearances-danger-and-death-what-is-happening-to-fishery-observers ,https://engineeringexploration.com/keith-davis-disappearance/ ,https://www.newser.com/story/325099/7-years-after-he-went-missing-at-sea-no-answers.html , https://www.cnn.com/2015/09/21/politics/coast-guard-investigate-american-peru-disappearance/index.html ,https://longreads.com/2017/01/15/the-mysterious-disappearance-of-keith-davis/ ,https://ici.radio-canada.ca/ohdio/premiere/emissions/les-annees-lumiere/segments/reportage/404960/chalutage-chalut-fond-surpeche-ecologie-marine ,https://www.nationalgeographic.org/activity/save-the-plankton-breathe-freely/#:~:text=Prochlorococcus%20and%20other%20ocean%20phytoplankton,of%20phytoplankton%20in%20the%20ocean. https://www.dfo-mpo.gc.ca/fisheries-peches/sustainable-durable/fisheries-peches/index-fra.html https://footprint.info.yorku.ca/data/data-stories/shark-fin-trends/#:~:text=Did%20you%20know%20that%20the,to%2073%20million%20individual%20sharks. , https://www.oceanssansfrontieres.com/pourquoi-les-requins-sont-essentiels-aux-oceans/

Link to bioRxiv paper: http://biorxiv.org/cgi/content/short/2020.11.04.368217v1?rss=1 Authors: Acker, M., Hogle, S. L., Berube, P. M., Hackl, T., Stepanauskas, R. M., Chisholm, S. W., Repeta, D. J. Abstract: Phosphonates, organic compounds with a C-P bond, constitute 20-25% of phosphorus in high molecular weight dissolved organic matter and are a significant phosphorus source for marine microbes. However, little is known about phosphonate sources, biological function, or biogeochemical cycling. Here, we determine the biogeographic distribution and prevalence of phosphonate biosynthesis potential using thousands of genomes and metagenomes from the upper 250 meters of the global ocean. Potential phosphonate producers are taxonomically diverse, occur in widely distributed and abundant marine lineages (including SAR11 and Prochlorococcus) and their abundance increases with depth. Within those lineages, phosphonate biosynthesis and catabolism pathways are mutually exclusive, indicating functional niche partitioning of organic phosphorus cycling in the marine microbiome. Surprisingly, one strain of Prochlorococcus (SB) can allocate more than 40% of its cellular P-quota towards phosphonate production. Chemical analyses and genomic evidence suggest that phosphonates in this strain are incorporated into surface layer glycoproteins that may act to reduce mortality from grazing or viral infection. Although phosphonate production is a low-frequency trait in Prochlorococcus populations (~ 5% of genomes), experimentally derived production rates suggest that Prochlorococcus could produce a significant fraction of the total phosphonate in the oligotrophic surface ocean. These results underscore the global biogeochemical impact of even relatively rare functional traits in abundant groups like Prochlorococcus and SAR11. Copy rights belong to original authors. Visit the link for more info

Prochlorococcus upptäcktes lite av en slump för trettio år sedan och har visat sig vara en av planetens viktigaste livsformer. Frågan är om vi människor ens skulle existerat om det inte varit för cyanobakterien Prochlorococcus. Vilka är dess hemligheter och varför tror forskarna att den kan sätta punkt för vårt beroende av fossila bränslen? I programmet hörs marinbiologen Sallie Chrisholm, och Kerstin Johannesson, professor i marin ekologi vid Göteborgs universitet. Programledare Agnes Faxén Producent Peter Normark peter.normark@sverigesradio.se

So just as your smartphone tells us something about how you live your life, your lifestyle, reading the genome of a Prochlorococcus cell tells us what the pressures are in its environment. It's like reading its diary, not only telling us how it got through its day or its week, but even its evolutionary history. As we studied -- I said we've sequenced hundreds of these cells, and we can now project what is the total genetic size -- gene pool -- of the Prochlorococcus federation, as we call it. It's like a superorganism. And it turns out that projections are that the collective has 80,000 genes. That's four times the size of the human genome. And it's that diversity of gene pools that makes it possible for them to dominate these large regions of the oceans and maintain their stability year in and year out.所以，就像你的智能手机告诉我们你是如何生活的，你的生活方式那样，读懂绿原球藻的基因序列就能告诉我们它们的生存环境的压力。就像读一本日期，不只是告诉我们它们是如何度过一天或一周的，甚至还可能读到它们的历史。就像我们研究的，我刚刚说过我们对几百种绿原球藻测序，我们现在可以预估出总的基因数，基因池，针对的是我们称之为的整个绿原球藻种群。这就像一个超级有机体。最终的估计是总计8万个基因。这是人类基因组的4倍。它们这样多样化的基因池使得它们在如此广大海域内占统治地位，年复一年地生存下来。13:40So when I daydream about Prochlorococcus, which I probably do more than is healthy --所以，当我整天想着绿原球藻，但我更应该考虑的是健康……13:46(Laughter)（笑声）13:48I imagine them floating out there, doing their job, maintaining the planet, feeding the animals. But also I inevitably end up thinking about what a masterpiece they are, finely tuned by millions of years of evolution. With 2,000 genes, they can do what all of our human ingenuity has not figured out how to do yet. They can take solar energy, CO2 and turn it into chemical energy in the form of organic carbon, locking that sunlight in those carbon bonds.我想象着它们从那儿浮出来，干着它们的工作，维护着地球，滋养着动物。但是最终我在想，它们是多么宏伟的篇章，在百万年的进化中完美调整自己。用2000个基因，他们就能做出人类迄今为止无法做到的。他们用太阳能，把二氧化碳转变成有机碳化合物的生物化学，把阳光锁定在碳键里。14:25If we could figure out exactly how they do this, it could inspire designs that could reduce our dependency on fossil fuels, which brings my story full circle.如果我们能够制造出和它们一摸一样的功能，就能鼓励我们设计出减少对于原油燃料的依赖，让我的故事圆满了。14:39The fossil fuels that are buried that we're burning took millions of years for the earth to bury those, including those ancestors of Prochlorococcus, and we're burning that now in the blink of an eye on geological timescales. Carbon dioxide is increasing in the atmosphere. It's a greenhouse gas. The oceans are starting to warm. So the question is, what is that going to do for my Prochlorococcus? And I'm sure you're expecting me to say that my beloved microbes are doomed, but in fact they're not. Projections are that their populations will expand as the ocean warms to 30 percent larger by the year 2100.那些被我们已经燃烧掉的和正在燃烧的石油燃料是花了千百万年地球埋藏的，包括那些绿原球藻的祖先，我们一眨眼就烧掉了，相对于地质时间坐标来说。二氧化碳在大气中浓度升高，这是一种温室气体。海洋开始变暖。 这样一来，问题就来了，我们原绿球藻将会怎样？我肯定大家希望我说我所挚爱的微生物大难临头，但事实是它们不会。据预测，如果海洋温度升高，他们的数量到2100年将增加30%15:24Does that make me happy? Well, it makes me happy for Prochlorococcus of course --这会令我高兴吗？嗯，他会令我为原绿球藻高兴……15:29(Laughter)（笑声）15:31but not for the planet. There are winners and losers in this global experiment that we've undertaken, and it's projected that among the losers will be some of those larger phytoplankton, those charismatic ones which are expected to be reduced in numbers, and they're the ones that feed the zooplankton that feed the fish that we like to harvest.但高兴不是对地球的。在我们正在进行的全球实验中有赢家也有输家，而且预计在输家中会有体形大一些的浮游植物，那些神一般的物种在数量上肯定会减少，它们可是浮游动物的食物，而浮游动物是我们喜欢的鱼的食物。15:56So Prochlorococcus has been my muse for the past 35 years, but there are legions of other microbes out there maintaining our planet for us. They're out there ready and waiting for us to find them so they can tell their stories, too.所以在过去的35年里，原绿球藻已经成为我的缪斯女神，但是还有很多其他的微生物在那儿，为我们维持着我们的星球。它们就在那儿，等待着我们发现它们，它们就可以讲述它们的故事了。16:12Thank you.谢谢16:13(Applause)（掌声）

So just as your smartphone tells us something about how you live your life, your lifestyle, reading the genome of a Prochlorococcus cell tells us what the pressures are in its environment. It's like reading its diary, not only telling us how it got through its day or its week, but even its evolutionary history. As we studied -- I said we've sequenced hundreds of these cells, and we can now project what is the total genetic size -- gene pool -- of the Prochlorococcus federation, as we call it. It's like a superorganism. And it turns out that projections are that the collective has 80,000 genes. That's four times the size of the human genome. And it's that diversity of gene pools that makes it possible for them to dominate these large regions of the oceans and maintain their stability year in and year out.所以，就像你的智能手机告诉我们你是如何生活的，你的生活方式那样，读懂绿原球藻的基因序列就能告诉我们它们的生存环境的压力。就像读一本日期，不只是告诉我们它们是如何度过一天或一周的，甚至还可能读到它们的历史。就像我们研究的，我刚刚说过我们对几百种绿原球藻测序，我们现在可以预估出总的基因数，基因池，针对的是我们称之为的整个绿原球藻种群。这就像一个超级有机体。最终的估计是总计8万个基因。这是人类基因组的4倍。它们这样多样化的基因池使得它们在如此广大海域内占统治地位，年复一年地生存下来。13:40So when I daydream about Prochlorococcus, which I probably do more than is healthy --所以，当我整天想着绿原球藻，但我更应该考虑的是健康……13:46(Laughter)（笑声）13:48I imagine them floating out there, doing their job, maintaining the planet, feeding the animals. But also I inevitably end up thinking about what a masterpiece they are, finely tuned by millions of years of evolution. With 2,000 genes, they can do what all of our human ingenuity has not figured out how to do yet. They can take solar energy, CO2 and turn it into chemical energy in the form of organic carbon, locking that sunlight in those carbon bonds.我想象着它们从那儿浮出来，干着它们的工作，维护着地球，滋养着动物。但是最终我在想，它们是多么宏伟的篇章，在百万年的进化中完美调整自己。用2000个基因，他们就能做出人类迄今为止无法做到的。他们用太阳能，把二氧化碳转变成有机碳化合物的生物化学，把阳光锁定在碳键里。14:25If we could figure out exactly how they do this, it could inspire designs that could reduce our dependency on fossil fuels, which brings my story full circle.如果我们能够制造出和它们一摸一样的功能，就能鼓励我们设计出减少对于原油燃料的依赖，让我的故事圆满了。14:39The fossil fuels that are buried that we're burning took millions of years for the earth to bury those, including those ancestors of Prochlorococcus, and we're burning that now in the blink of an eye on geological timescales. Carbon dioxide is increasing in the atmosphere. It's a greenhouse gas. The oceans are starting to warm. So the question is, what is that going to do for my Prochlorococcus? And I'm sure you're expecting me to say that my beloved microbes are doomed, but in fact they're not. Projections are that their populations will expand as the ocean warms to 30 percent larger by the year 2100.那些被我们已经燃烧掉的和正在燃烧的石油燃料是花了千百万年地球埋藏的，包括那些绿原球藻的祖先，我们一眨眼就烧掉了，相对于地质时间坐标来说。二氧化碳在大气中浓度升高，这是一种温室气体。海洋开始变暖。 这样一来，问题就来了，我们原绿球藻将会怎样？我肯定大家希望我说我所挚爱的微生物大难临头，但事实是它们不会。据预测，如果海洋温度升高，他们的数量到2100年将增加30%15:24Does that make me happy? Well, it makes me happy for Prochlorococcus of course --这会令我高兴吗？嗯，他会令我为原绿球藻高兴……15:29(Laughter)（笑声）15:31but not for the planet. There are winners and losers in this global experiment that we've undertaken, and it's projected that among the losers will be some of those larger phytoplankton, those charismatic ones which are expected to be reduced in numbers, and they're the ones that feed the zooplankton that feed the fish that we like to harvest.但高兴不是对地球的。在我们正在进行的全球实验中有赢家也有输家，而且预计在输家中会有体形大一些的浮游植物，那些神一般的物种在数量上肯定会减少，它们可是浮游动物的食物，而浮游动物是我们喜欢的鱼的食物。15:56So Prochlorococcus has been my muse for the past 35 years, but there are legions of other microbes out there maintaining our planet for us. They're out there ready and waiting for us to find them so they can tell their stories, too.所以在过去的35年里，原绿球藻已经成为我的缪斯女神，但是还有很多其他的微生物在那儿，为我们维持着我们的星球。它们就在那儿，等待着我们发现它们，它们就可以讲述它们的故事了。16:12Thank you.谢谢16:13(Applause)（掌声）

And collectively, they weigh more than the human population and they photosynthesize as much as all of the crops on land. They're incredibly important in the global ocean. So over the years, as we were studying them and found how abundant they were, we thought, hmm, this is really strange. How can a single species be so abundant across so many different habitats? And as we isolated more into culture, we learned that they are different ecotypes. There are some that are adapted to the high-light intensities in the surface water, and there are some that are adapted to the low light in the deep ocean. In fact, those cells that live in the bottom of the sunlit zone are the most efficient photosynthesizers of any known cell. And then we learned that there are some strains that grow optimally along the equator, where there are higher temperatures, and some that do better at the cooler temperatures as you go north and south.它们的重量集中在一起超过人类，而且它们光合作用量和陆地上所有庄稼一样多。他们对全球海洋是不可思议的重要。所以过去几年，我们研究它们到底有多大的数量。我想，这真的是奇妙。一个单一的种类是如何有那么多的栖息地的？当我们隔离更多的绿原球藻在培养液中之后，了解到他们是不同的生态类型。有一些在水面的适应了直射的光强度，又一些在深水适应了低亮度的环境。实际上，那些我们已知细胞都是在阳光照射到的水域底部光合作用效率最高。遂而，我们又了解到有一些种类适宜在沿着赤道的水域生长，那儿有更高的水温；还有，当沿经线考察的时候，有一些种类在更冷的水温下生长得更好。10:22So as we studied these more and more and kept finding more and more diversity, we thought, oh my God, how diverse are these things? And about that time, it became possible to sequence their genomes and really look under the hood and look at their genetic makeup. And we've been able to sequence the genomes of cultures that we have, but also recently, using flow cytometry, we can isolate individual cells from the wild and sequence their individual genomes, and now we've sequenced hundreds of Prochlorococcus. And although each cell has roughly 2,000 genes -- that's one tenth the size of the human genome -- as you sequence more and more, you find that they only have a thousand of those in common and the other thousand for each individual strain is drawn from an enormous gene pool, and it reflects the particular environment that the cell might have thrived in, not just high or low light or high or low temperature, but whether there are nutrients that limit them like nitrogen, phosphorus or iron. It reflects the habitat that they come from.所以，当研究越来越深入，发现多样性也越来越多， 我们会想：“我的天啊，得有多少种类啊！？”大概就在那个时候，基因组测序成为可能，我们可以真正的看看在外表之下的基因组合，所以现在我们已经能够对我们所培养的绿原球藻的基因组进行测序了，而且最近，我们用流血细胞分析仪计数器对从混杂的品种中隔离出的单一的绿原球藻细胞的基因组进行测序，已经测了几百种个了。虽然每一个细胞的基因大致有2000个，是人类基因数的十分之一。当测得越来越多，你就会发现这中间只有1000个是通用的，而另外1000个是从庞大的基因库中派生出来的，是反应它们得以茁长生长的特殊环境的，不只是光线的强弱或者温度的高低，还有比如是否养分是否充足，比如氮、磷、铁。这反应了它们的生存环境。Think of it this way. If each cell is a smartphone and the apps are the genes, when you get your smartphone, it comes with these built-in apps. Those are the ones that you can't delete if you're an iPhone person. You press on them and they don't jiggle and they don't have x's. Even if you don't want them, you can't get rid of them.咱们这么想。如果每一个细胞是智能手机，应用是基因，当你有了一台智能手机，有内置应用。那些是你不能删除的，如果你是iPone的用户。你长按它们，它们不抖动，也没有叉叉。即使你不想要它们，你也不能丢弃它们。(Laughter)（笑声）Those are like the core genes of Prochlorococcus. They're the essence of the phone. But you have a huge pool of apps to draw upon to make your phone custom-designed for your particular lifestyle and habitat. If you travel a lot, you'll have a lot of travel apps, if you're into financial things, you might have a lot of financial apps, or if you're like me, you probably have a lot of weather apps, hoping one of them will tell you what you want to hear.那些就像原绿球藻的核心基因。它们是智能手机的本质体现。但是你有巨大的应用池来根据你的特定的生活方式和习惯定制你的智能手机。如果你经常旅游，你会装很多旅游的应用，如果你专注于财务，你可能装了很多财务的应用，或者如果你像我，你可能有很多天气的应用，希望它们中的某一个能告诉你所在这个地方你想要的天气预报结果。(Laughter)（笑声）And I've learned the last couple days in Vancouver that you don't need a weather app -- you just need an umbrella. So --不过在过去几天中我已经知道在温哥华，你不需要天气应用，你只需要一把伞，所以……

And collectively, they weigh more than the human population and they photosynthesize as much as all of the crops on land. They're incredibly important in the global ocean. So over the years, as we were studying them and found how abundant they were, we thought, hmm, this is really strange. How can a single species be so abundant across so many different habitats? And as we isolated more into culture, we learned that they are different ecotypes. There are some that are adapted to the high-light intensities in the surface water, and there are some that are adapted to the low light in the deep ocean. In fact, those cells that live in the bottom of the sunlit zone are the most efficient photosynthesizers of any known cell. And then we learned that there are some strains that grow optimally along the equator, where there are higher temperatures, and some that do better at the cooler temperatures as you go north and south.它们的重量集中在一起超过人类，而且它们光合作用量和陆地上所有庄稼一样多。他们对全球海洋是不可思议的重要。所以过去几年，我们研究它们到底有多大的数量。我想，这真的是奇妙。一个单一的种类是如何有那么多的栖息地的？当我们隔离更多的绿原球藻在培养液中之后，了解到他们是不同的生态类型。有一些在水面的适应了直射的光强度，又一些在深水适应了低亮度的环境。实际上，那些我们已知细胞都是在阳光照射到的水域底部光合作用效率最高。遂而，我们又了解到有一些种类适宜在沿着赤道的水域生长，那儿有更高的水温；还有，当沿经线考察的时候，有一些种类在更冷的水温下生长得更好。10:22So as we studied these more and more and kept finding more and more diversity, we thought, oh my God, how diverse are these things? And about that time, it became possible to sequence their genomes and really look under the hood and look at their genetic makeup. And we've been able to sequence the genomes of cultures that we have, but also recently, using flow cytometry, we can isolate individual cells from the wild and sequence their individual genomes, and now we've sequenced hundreds of Prochlorococcus. And although each cell has roughly 2,000 genes -- that's one tenth the size of the human genome -- as you sequence more and more, you find that they only have a thousand of those in common and the other thousand for each individual strain is drawn from an enormous gene pool, and it reflects the particular environment that the cell might have thrived in, not just high or low light or high or low temperature, but whether there are nutrients that limit them like nitrogen, phosphorus or iron. It reflects the habitat that they come from.所以，当研究越来越深入，发现多样性也越来越多， 我们会想：“我的天啊，得有多少种类啊！？”大概就在那个时候，基因组测序成为可能，我们可以真正的看看在外表之下的基因组合，所以现在我们已经能够对我们所培养的绿原球藻的基因组进行测序了，而且最近，我们用流血细胞分析仪计数器对从混杂的品种中隔离出的单一的绿原球藻细胞的基因组进行测序，已经测了几百种个了。虽然每一个细胞的基因大致有2000个，是人类基因数的十分之一。当测得越来越多，你就会发现这中间只有1000个是通用的，而另外1000个是从庞大的基因库中派生出来的，是反应它们得以茁长生长的特殊环境的，不只是光线的强弱或者温度的高低，还有比如是否养分是否充足，比如氮、磷、铁。这反应了它们的生存环境。Think of it this way. If each cell is a smartphone and the apps are the genes, when you get your smartphone, it comes with these built-in apps. Those are the ones that you can't delete if you're an iPhone person. You press on them and they don't jiggle and they don't have x's. Even if you don't want them, you can't get rid of them.咱们这么想。如果每一个细胞是智能手机，应用是基因，当你有了一台智能手机，有内置应用。那些是你不能删除的，如果你是iPone的用户。你长按它们，它们不抖动，也没有叉叉。即使你不想要它们，你也不能丢弃它们。(Laughter)（笑声）Those are like the core genes of Prochlorococcus. They're the essence of the phone. But you have a huge pool of apps to draw upon to make your phone custom-designed for your particular lifestyle and habitat. If you travel a lot, you'll have a lot of travel apps, if you're into financial things, you might have a lot of financial apps, or if you're like me, you probably have a lot of weather apps, hoping one of them will tell you what you want to hear.那些就像原绿球藻的核心基因。它们是智能手机的本质体现。但是你有巨大的应用池来根据你的特定的生活方式和习惯定制你的智能手机。如果你经常旅游，你会装很多旅游的应用，如果你专注于财务，你可能装了很多财务的应用，或者如果你像我，你可能有很多天气的应用，希望它们中的某一个能告诉你所在这个地方你想要的天气预报结果。(Laughter)（笑声）And I've learned the last couple days in Vancouver that you don't need a weather app -- you just need an umbrella. So --不过在过去几天中我已经知道在温哥华，你不需要天气应用，你只需要一把伞，所以……

But all that time, we thought, well wouldn&`&t it be really cool if we could take an instrument like this out on a ship and just squirt seawater through it and see what all those diversity of phytoplankton would look like. So I managed to get my hands on what we call a big rig in flow cytometry, a large, powerful laser with a money-back guarantee from the company that if it didn&`&t work on a ship, they would take it back. And so a young scientist that I was working with at the time, Rob Olson, was able to take this thing apart, put it on a ship, put it back together and take it off to sea. And it worked like a charm. We didn&`&t think it would, because we thought the ship&`&s vibrations would get in the way of the focusing of the laser, but it really worked like a charm. And so we mapped the phytoplankton distributions across the ocean. For the first time, you could look at them, one cell at a time, in real time, and see what was going on -- that was very exciting. But one day, Rob noticed some faint signals coming out of the instrument that we dismissed as electronic noise for probably a year, before we realized that it wasn&`&t really behaving like noise. It had some regular patterns to it. To make a long story short, it was tiny, tiny little cells, less than one-one hundredth the width of a human hair that contain chlorophyl. That was Prochlorococcus.那时候我在想，如果我们我们可以拿着这样的设备到船上去，就把海水通过它来检验，来观察各种各样的浮游植物的样子，会不会很得劲？所以我设法搞到一个我称之为大平台的流血细胞计数器，一个大型的、强大的激光发生器，并获得厂商的保证，如果在船上不能用，就退货。一位当时和我一起工作的年轻科学家 Rob Olson 可以把这家伙带上船，安装在一起，一起出海。它运转起来太棒了。我们根本没有想到，因为我们觉得船的震动会阻碍到激光，但是它真的运转得很棒。然后，我们就绘制了海洋浮游植物分布图。这是真正的第一次看到一个细胞，看看正在发生什么，这真是太激动人心了。但是有一天，Rob注意到一些来自仪器以外的模糊信号，而这个信号一年前以来我们以为是可能电子噪声而被忽略了，然而这时意识到它并不像噪声。它又一些规则行图案。长话短说，这是一种极其微小的含有叶绿素的细胞，它比人类的头发宽度的百分之一还小。那就是绿原球藻。So remember this slide that I showed you? If you shine blue light on that same sample, this is what you see: two tiny little red light-emitting cells. Those are Prochlorococcus. They are the smallest and most abundant photosynthetic cell on the planet. At first, we didn&`&t know what they were, so we called the "little greens." It was a very affectionate name for them. Ultimately, we knew enough about them to give them the name Prochlorococcus, which means "primitive green berry."有谁还记得这页我刚刚展示过的幻灯片吗？如果你用蓝光照射那两个样本，这就是你看到的：两点微小的发着红光的细胞。这些就是绿原球藻。他们是地球上最小的，又是量最大的，叶绿素细胞。一开始，我们不知道它是什么，就用“小绿”来称呼它。这是一个非常亲切的名字。后来，我们对它了解足够多了，就命名它叫“绿原球藻”，意思是“远古的绿色浆果”。And it was about that time that I became so smitten by these little cells that I redirected my entire lab to study them and nothing else, and my loyalty to them has really paid off. They&`&ve given me a tremendous amount, including bringing me here.也差不多在这个时候，我被这些小细胞迷得神魂颠倒，以至于我重新调整了整个实验室的研究方向，来专心研究他们，当然我对他们的忠诚回报也是很大的。他们给予我的非常多，包括我来到这里。(Applause)（鼓掌）So over the years, we and others, many others, have studied Prochlorococcus across the oceans and found that they&`&re very abundant over wide, wide ranges in the open ocean ecosystem. They&`&re particularly abundant in what are called the open ocean gyres. These are sometimes referred to as the deserts of the oceans, but they&`&re not deserts at all. Their deep blue water is teeming with a hundred million Prochlorococcus cells per liter. If you crowd them together like we do in our cultures, you can see their beautiful green chlorophyl. One of those test tubes has a billion Prochlorococcus in it, and as I told you earlier, there are three billion billion billion of them on the planet. That&`&s three octillion, if you care to convert.经过多年，我和其他，非常多的其他人遍及各个海域研究绿原球藻，发现他们非常非常广泛地分布在开放海域生态系统，尤其是在开放海洋环流中。这些有时候会被称为海洋荒漠，但是他们根本就不是荒漠。在深海里也充满着每升水一亿的绿原球藻。如果你把他们像我们培养群那样聚集起来，你可以看到美丽的绿色叶绿素。那些试管里的一根就有10亿个原绿球藻，就像我前面提到过的，地球上有300亿亿亿原绿球藻，那是3乘10的27次方，如果你想转换的话。

But all that time, we thought, well wouldn&`&t it be really cool if we could take an instrument like this out on a ship and just squirt seawater through it and see what all those diversity of phytoplankton would look like. So I managed to get my hands on what we call a big rig in flow cytometry, a large, powerful laser with a money-back guarantee from the company that if it didn&`&t work on a ship, they would take it back. And so a young scientist that I was working with at the time, Rob Olson, was able to take this thing apart, put it on a ship, put it back together and take it off to sea. And it worked like a charm. We didn&`&t think it would, because we thought the ship&`&s vibrations would get in the way of the focusing of the laser, but it really worked like a charm. And so we mapped the phytoplankton distributions across the ocean. For the first time, you could look at them, one cell at a time, in real time, and see what was going on -- that was very exciting. But one day, Rob noticed some faint signals coming out of the instrument that we dismissed as electronic noise for probably a year, before we realized that it wasn&`&t really behaving like noise. It had some regular patterns to it. To make a long story short, it was tiny, tiny little cells, less than one-one hundredth the width of a human hair that contain chlorophyl. That was Prochlorococcus.那时候我在想，如果我们我们可以拿着这样的设备到船上去，就把海水通过它来检验，来观察各种各样的浮游植物的样子，会不会很得劲？所以我设法搞到一个我称之为大平台的流血细胞计数器，一个大型的、强大的激光发生器，并获得厂商的保证，如果在船上不能用，就退货。一位当时和我一起工作的年轻科学家 Rob Olson 可以把这家伙带上船，安装在一起，一起出海。它运转起来太棒了。我们根本没有想到，因为我们觉得船的震动会阻碍到激光，但是它真的运转得很棒。然后，我们就绘制了海洋浮游植物分布图。这是真正的第一次看到一个细胞，看看正在发生什么，这真是太激动人心了。但是有一天，Rob注意到一些来自仪器以外的模糊信号，而这个信号一年前以来我们以为是可能电子噪声而被忽略了，然而这时意识到它并不像噪声。它又一些规则行图案。长话短说，这是一种极其微小的含有叶绿素的细胞，它比人类的头发宽度的百分之一还小。那就是绿原球藻。So remember this slide that I showed you? If you shine blue light on that same sample, this is what you see: two tiny little red light-emitting cells. Those are Prochlorococcus. They are the smallest and most abundant photosynthetic cell on the planet. At first, we didn&`&t know what they were, so we called the "little greens." It was a very affectionate name for them. Ultimately, we knew enough about them to give them the name Prochlorococcus, which means "primitive green berry."有谁还记得这页我刚刚展示过的幻灯片吗？如果你用蓝光照射那两个样本，这就是你看到的：两点微小的发着红光的细胞。这些就是绿原球藻。他们是地球上最小的，又是量最大的，叶绿素细胞。一开始，我们不知道它是什么，就用“小绿”来称呼它。这是一个非常亲切的名字。后来，我们对它了解足够多了，就命名它叫“绿原球藻”，意思是“远古的绿色浆果”。And it was about that time that I became so smitten by these little cells that I redirected my entire lab to study them and nothing else, and my loyalty to them has really paid off. They&`&ve given me a tremendous amount, including bringing me here.也差不多在这个时候，我被这些小细胞迷得神魂颠倒，以至于我重新调整了整个实验室的研究方向，来专心研究他们，当然我对他们的忠诚回报也是很大的。他们给予我的非常多，包括我来到这里。(Applause)（鼓掌）So over the years, we and others, many others, have studied Prochlorococcus across the oceans and found that they&`&re very abundant over wide, wide ranges in the open ocean ecosystem. They&`&re particularly abundant in what are called the open ocean gyres. These are sometimes referred to as the deserts of the oceans, but they&`&re not deserts at all. Their deep blue water is teeming with a hundred million Prochlorococcus cells per liter. If you crowd them together like we do in our cultures, you can see their beautiful green chlorophyl. One of those test tubes has a billion Prochlorococcus in it, and as I told you earlier, there are three billion billion billion of them on the planet. That&`&s three octillion, if you care to convert.经过多年，我和其他，非常多的其他人遍及各个海域研究绿原球藻，发现他们非常非常广泛地分布在开放海域生态系统，尤其是在开放海洋环流中。这些有时候会被称为海洋荒漠，但是他们根本就不是荒漠。在深海里也充满着每升水一亿的绿原球藻。如果你把他们像我们培养群那样聚集起来，你可以看到美丽的绿色叶绿素。那些试管里的一根就有10亿个原绿球藻，就像我前面提到过的，地球上有300亿亿亿原绿球藻，那是3乘10的27次方，如果你想转换的话。

So as terrestrial beings, we're very familiar with the plants on land: the trees, the grasses, the pastures, the crops. But the oceans are filled with billions of tons of animals. Do you ever wonder what's feeding them? Well there's an invisible pasture of microscopic photosynthesizers called phytoplankton that fill the upper 200 meters of the ocean, and they feed the entire open ocean ecosystem. Some of the animals live among them and eat them, and others swim up to feed on them at night, while others sit in the deep and wait for them to die and settle down and then they chow down on them.作为陆生生物，我们对陆地上的植物、树木、草地、牧场、田园非常熟悉。但是在海洋里有成百上千吨的动物。你们是否想过它们吃什么？有一个由只能在显微镜下才能看到的光合作用体组成的肉眼看不到的牧场，被称为浮游植物，它们充斥在海洋200米的上层水域中，它们养育着整个开放海域生态系统。有些动物生活在过它们周围并以它们为食物，另外一些动物在夜间游上来进食，而还有另外一些只是呆在深水底部，等待它们死亡后沉到水底并大口吞食它们。03:35So these tiny phytoplankton, collectively, weigh less than one percent of all the plants on land, but annually they photosynthesize as much as all of the plants on land, including the Amazon rainforest that we consider the lungs of the planet. Every year, they fix 50 billion tons of carbon in the form of carbon dioxide into their bodies that feeds the ocean ecosystem. How does this tiny amount of produce as much as all the plants on land? Well, they don't have trunks and stems and flowers and fruits and all that to maintain. All they have to do is grow and divide and grow and divide. They're really lean little photosynthesis machines. They really crank.所以，这些微小的浮游植物，总和起来，重量比陆地上所有植物的总和的1%还少，但是一年的光合作用比陆地上的所有植物总和多得多，这还包括了我们认为是地球之肺的亚马逊雨林。每年，它们把500亿吨的碳吸收到自己身体里为海洋生态提供食物，而这些碳原来是以二氧化碳的形式存在的。这样少量的产量是怎样怎么做到和陆生植物相当的？嗯，它们没有树干、没有茎、没有花和水果，这些都不需要维持。所有它们要做的只是生长、分裂、生长、分裂。它们真是高效而小型的光合作用机器，它们太奇怪了。04:27So there are thousands of different species of phytoplankton, come in all different shapes and sizes, all roughly less than the width of a human hair. Here, I'm showing you some of the more beautiful ones, the textbook versions. I call them the charismatic species of phytoplankton.所以，有成千上万的不同种类的浮游植物，它们的形状和大小不同，但都比人类的头发丝的宽度小。我在这里展示给大家看的是最漂亮的一部分，都是是教科书级别的。我称呼他们是浮游植物中的神之类别。04:48And here is Prochlorococcus. I know, it just looks like a bunch of schmutz on a microscope slide.这儿就是原绿球藻，我知道它在显微镜载玻片上看起来就这么一滩。04:56(Laughter)（笑声）04:58But they're in there, and I'm going to reveal them to you in a minute. But first I want to tell you how they were discovered.但是，它们就在这里，而且也是我马上要向大家展示的，但是我先想想告诉大家它们是怎么被发现的。05:08About 38 years ago, we were playing around with a technology in my lab called flow cytometry that was developed for biomedical research for studying cells like cancer cells, but it turns out we were using it for this off-label purpose which was to study phytoplankton, and it was beautifully suited to do that. And here's how it works: so you inject a sample in this tiny little capillary tube, and the cells go single file by a laser, and as they do, they scatter light according to their size and they emit light according to whatever pigments they might have, whether they're natural or whether you stain them. And the chlorophyl of phytoplankton, which is green, emits red light when you shine blue light on it. And so we used this instrument for several years to study our phytoplankton cultures, species like those charismatic ones that I showed you, just studying their basic cell biology.大概在38年前，在我的实验室里，我们正在摆弄一种技术称为流血细胞计数器，它本来是用在生物医学领域搜寻并研究细胞的，比如癌细胞，但是我们把它挪作他用，用来研究浮游植物，没想到它用来干这件事太适合了。接下来是具体做法：你要把这些样本注射到这跟毛细试管中，然后这些细胞在激光的作用下排成一列，然后，它们依据自身的大小把光吸收，并依据自身所存在的色素发射出光线，无论是染不染色都一样。当用蓝色的光找到浮游植物上后发出了红色的光（叶绿素本身是绿色的）。接下来，我们用这套仪器花了几年时间研究我们的浮游植物的样本，样本的种类是那些刚才展示给大家的“神之类别”，研究的是它们的基础细胞生物特性。

So as terrestrial beings, we're very familiar with the plants on land: the trees, the grasses, the pastures, the crops. But the oceans are filled with billions of tons of animals. Do you ever wonder what's feeding them? Well there's an invisible pasture of microscopic photosynthesizers called phytoplankton that fill the upper 200 meters of the ocean, and they feed the entire open ocean ecosystem. Some of the animals live among them and eat them, and others swim up to feed on them at night, while others sit in the deep and wait for them to die and settle down and then they chow down on them.作为陆生生物，我们对陆地上的植物、树木、草地、牧场、田园非常熟悉。但是在海洋里有成百上千吨的动物。你们是否想过它们吃什么？有一个由只能在显微镜下才能看到的光合作用体组成的肉眼看不到的牧场，被称为浮游植物，它们充斥在海洋200米的上层水域中，它们养育着整个开放海域生态系统。有些动物生活在过它们周围并以它们为食物，另外一些动物在夜间游上来进食，而还有另外一些只是呆在深水底部，等待它们死亡后沉到水底并大口吞食它们。03:35So these tiny phytoplankton, collectively, weigh less than one percent of all the plants on land, but annually they photosynthesize as much as all of the plants on land, including the Amazon rainforest that we consider the lungs of the planet. Every year, they fix 50 billion tons of carbon in the form of carbon dioxide into their bodies that feeds the ocean ecosystem. How does this tiny amount of produce as much as all the plants on land? Well, they don't have trunks and stems and flowers and fruits and all that to maintain. All they have to do is grow and divide and grow and divide. They're really lean little photosynthesis machines. They really crank.所以，这些微小的浮游植物，总和起来，重量比陆地上所有植物的总和的1%还少，但是一年的光合作用比陆地上的所有植物总和多得多，这还包括了我们认为是地球之肺的亚马逊雨林。每年，它们把500亿吨的碳吸收到自己身体里为海洋生态提供食物，而这些碳原来是以二氧化碳的形式存在的。这样少量的产量是怎样怎么做到和陆生植物相当的？嗯，它们没有树干、没有茎、没有花和水果，这些都不需要维持。所有它们要做的只是生长、分裂、生长、分裂。它们真是高效而小型的光合作用机器，它们太奇怪了。04:27So there are thousands of different species of phytoplankton, come in all different shapes and sizes, all roughly less than the width of a human hair. Here, I'm showing you some of the more beautiful ones, the textbook versions. I call them the charismatic species of phytoplankton.所以，有成千上万的不同种类的浮游植物，它们的形状和大小不同，但都比人类的头发丝的宽度小。我在这里展示给大家看的是最漂亮的一部分，都是是教科书级别的。我称呼他们是浮游植物中的神之类别。04:48And here is Prochlorococcus. I know, it just looks like a bunch of schmutz on a microscope slide.这儿就是原绿球藻，我知道它在显微镜载玻片上看起来就这么一滩。04:56(Laughter)（笑声）04:58But they're in there, and I'm going to reveal them to you in a minute. But first I want to tell you how they were discovered.但是，它们就在这里，而且也是我马上要向大家展示的，但是我先想想告诉大家它们是怎么被发现的。05:08About 38 years ago, we were playing around with a technology in my lab called flow cytometry that was developed for biomedical research for studying cells like cancer cells, but it turns out we were using it for this off-label purpose which was to study phytoplankton, and it was beautifully suited to do that. And here's how it works: so you inject a sample in this tiny little capillary tube, and the cells go single file by a laser, and as they do, they scatter light according to their size and they emit light according to whatever pigments they might have, whether they're natural or whether you stain them. And the chlorophyl of phytoplankton, which is green, emits red light when you shine blue light on it. And so we used this instrument for several years to study our phytoplankton cultures, species like those charismatic ones that I showed you, just studying their basic cell biology.大概在38年前，在我的实验室里，我们正在摆弄一种技术称为流血细胞计数器，它本来是用在生物医学领域搜寻并研究细胞的，比如癌细胞，但是我们把它挪作他用，用来研究浮游植物，没想到它用来干这件事太适合了。接下来是具体做法：你要把这些样本注射到这跟毛细试管中，然后这些细胞在激光的作用下排成一列，然后，它们依据自身的大小把光吸收，并依据自身所存在的色素发射出光线，无论是染不染色都一样。当用蓝色的光找到浮游植物上后发出了红色的光（叶绿素本身是绿色的）。接下来，我们用这套仪器花了几年时间研究我们的浮游植物的样本，样本的种类是那些刚才展示给大家的“神之类别”，研究的是它们的基础细胞生物特性。

The tiny creature that secretly powers the planetI'd like to introduce you to a tiny microorganism that you've probably never heard of: its name is Prochlorococcus, and it&`&s really an amazing little being.我想要给大家介绍一种非常微小的微生物，你可能从来没有听说过，它的名字叫原绿球藻，真的是一种令人兴奋的生灵。For one thing, its ancestors changed the earth in ways that made it possible for us to evolve, and hidden in its genetic code is a blueprint that may inspire ways to reduce our dependency on fossil fuel. But the most amazing thing is that there are three billion billion billion of these tiny cells on the planet, and we didn't know they existed until 35 years ago.首先，它的祖先在很多方面改变了地球，使得地球提供给让我们进化的可能，另外隐藏在它的基因序列里的是一张蓝图，它可以赋予我们减少对石油能源依赖诸多方法。但是最令人不可思议的是它们在这颗星球上有300亿亿亿之多，而我们直到35年前才知道它们的存在。So to tell you their story, I need to first take you way back, four billion years ago, when the earth might have looked something like this. There was no life on the planet, there was no oxygen in the atmosphere. So what happened to change that planet into the one we enjoy today, teeming with life, teeming with plants and animals?为了给你们讲述他的故事，我需要首先带大家回到40亿年前，当地球看上去可能是这样。地球上没有生命，大气中没有氧气。那么是发生了什么才让地球变得像今天我们能够适应的样子？到处是生命、到处有植物和动物。Well, in a word, photosynthesis. About two and a half billion years ago, some of these ancient ancestors of Prochlorococcus evolved so that they could use solar energy and absorb it and split water into its component parts of oxygen and hydrogen. And they used the chemical energy produced to draw CO2, carbon dioxide, out of the atmosphere and use it to build sugars and proteins and amino acids, all the things that life is made of. And as they evolved and grew more and more over millions and millions of years, that oxygen accumulated in the atmosphere. Until about 500 million years ago, there was enough in the atmosphere that larger organisms could evolve. There was an explosion of life-forms, and, ultimately, we appeared on the scene. While that was going on, some of those ancient photosynthesizers died and were compressed and buried, and became fossil fuel with sunlight buried in their carbon bonds. They're basically buried sunlight in the form of coal and oil. Today's photosynthesizers, their engines are descended from those ancient microbes, and they feed basically all of life on earth. Your heart is beating using the solar energy that some plant processed for you, and the stuff your body is made out of is made out of CO2 that some plant processed for you. Basically, we're all made out of sunlight and carbon dioxide. Fundamentally, we're just hot air.那么，用一个词，叫“光合作用”。 大概在25亿年前，这些古老的原绿球藻的祖先开始进化，所以他们吸收并利用阳光中的能量从水中分离出氧和氢这两种组成物质。并且利用化学能来生产，它们从大气中吸收二氧化碳，并用它来构造糖、蛋白质和氨基酸这些构成生命的物质。随着他们的进化和生长得越来越多，时间也过了成千上万年，氧气就在大气中积累出来。直到5亿年前，足够多的氧气在大气中，更大的生物才得以进化。物种大爆发产生了，并且最终，我们出现在这场大爆发中。在这个过程中，那些古老的光合作用体死亡了，它们被挤压、覆盖，最终变成了石油燃料，也就是阳光被储存在碳键中。通常来说阳光以煤和石油的形式掩埋这。今天的光合作用体，它们的能量继承于古代的微生物，并且供养者几乎地球上所有的生命。你心脏持续的跳动，使用的是植物为你转换过来的太阳能，组成你躯体的材料是由植物为你转换的二氧化碳组成的。基本上我们都是由阳光和二氧化碳组成的。原则上，我们只是热空气。

The tiny creature that secretly powers the planetI'd like to introduce you to a tiny microorganism that you've probably never heard of: its name is Prochlorococcus, and it&`&s really an amazing little being.我想要给大家介绍一种非常微小的微生物，你可能从来没有听说过，它的名字叫原绿球藻，真的是一种令人兴奋的生灵。For one thing, its ancestors changed the earth in ways that made it possible for us to evolve, and hidden in its genetic code is a blueprint that may inspire ways to reduce our dependency on fossil fuel. But the most amazing thing is that there are three billion billion billion of these tiny cells on the planet, and we didn't know they existed until 35 years ago.首先，它的祖先在很多方面改变了地球，使得地球提供给让我们进化的可能，另外隐藏在它的基因序列里的是一张蓝图，它可以赋予我们减少对石油能源依赖诸多方法。但是最令人不可思议的是它们在这颗星球上有300亿亿亿之多，而我们直到35年前才知道它们的存在。So to tell you their story, I need to first take you way back, four billion years ago, when the earth might have looked something like this. There was no life on the planet, there was no oxygen in the atmosphere. So what happened to change that planet into the one we enjoy today, teeming with life, teeming with plants and animals?为了给你们讲述他的故事，我需要首先带大家回到40亿年前，当地球看上去可能是这样。地球上没有生命，大气中没有氧气。那么是发生了什么才让地球变得像今天我们能够适应的样子？到处是生命、到处有植物和动物。Well, in a word, photosynthesis. About two and a half billion years ago, some of these ancient ancestors of Prochlorococcus evolved so that they could use solar energy and absorb it and split water into its component parts of oxygen and hydrogen. And they used the chemical energy produced to draw CO2, carbon dioxide, out of the atmosphere and use it to build sugars and proteins and amino acids, all the things that life is made of. And as they evolved and grew more and more over millions and millions of years, that oxygen accumulated in the atmosphere. Until about 500 million years ago, there was enough in the atmosphere that larger organisms could evolve. There was an explosion of life-forms, and, ultimately, we appeared on the scene. While that was going on, some of those ancient photosynthesizers died and were compressed and buried, and became fossil fuel with sunlight buried in their carbon bonds. They're basically buried sunlight in the form of coal and oil. Today's photosynthesizers, their engines are descended from those ancient microbes, and they feed basically all of life on earth. Your heart is beating using the solar energy that some plant processed for you, and the stuff your body is made out of is made out of CO2 that some plant processed for you. Basically, we're all made out of sunlight and carbon dioxide. Fundamentally, we're just hot air.那么，用一个词，叫“光合作用”。 大概在25亿年前，这些古老的原绿球藻的祖先开始进化，所以他们吸收并利用阳光中的能量从水中分离出氧和氢这两种组成物质。并且利用化学能来生产，它们从大气中吸收二氧化碳，并用它来构造糖、蛋白质和氨基酸这些构成生命的物质。随着他们的进化和生长得越来越多，时间也过了成千上万年，氧气就在大气中积累出来。直到5亿年前，足够多的氧气在大气中，更大的生物才得以进化。物种大爆发产生了，并且最终，我们出现在这场大爆发中。在这个过程中，那些古老的光合作用体死亡了，它们被挤压、覆盖，最终变成了石油燃料，也就是阳光被储存在碳键中。通常来说阳光以煤和石油的形式掩埋这。今天的光合作用体，它们的能量继承于古代的微生物，并且供养者几乎地球上所有的生命。你心脏持续的跳动，使用的是植物为你转换过来的太阳能，组成你躯体的材料是由植物为你转换的二氧化碳组成的。基本上我们都是由阳光和二氧化碳组成的。原则上，我们只是热空气。

I'd like to introduce you to a tiny microorganism that you've probably never heard of: its name is Prochlorococcus, and it's really an amazing little being.For one thing, its ancestors changed the earth in ways that made it possible for us to evolve, and hidden in its genetic code is a blueprint that may inspire ways to reduce our dependency on fossil fuel. But the most amazing thing is that there are three billion billion billion of these tiny cells on the planet, and we didn't know they existed until 35 years ago.So to tell you their story, I need to first take you way back, four billion years ago, when the earth might have looked something like this. There was no life on the planet, there was no oxygen in the atmosphere. So what happened to change that planet into the one we enjoy today, teeming with life, teeming with plants and animals?Well, in a word, photosynthesis. About two and a half billion years ago, some of these ancient ancestors of Prochlorococcus evolved so that they could use solar energy and absorb it and split water into its component parts of oxygen and hydrogen. And they used the chemical energy produced to draw CO2, carbon dioxide, out of the atmosphere and use it to build sugars and proteins and amino acids, all the things that life is made of. And as they evolved and grew more and more over millions and millions of years, that oxygen accumulated in the atmosphere. Until about 500 million years ago, there was enough in the atmosphere that larger organisms could evolve. There was an explosion of life-forms, and, ultimately, we appeared on the scene. While that was going on, some of those ancient photosynthesizers died and were compressed and buried, and became fossil fuel with sunlight buried in their carbon bonds. They're basically buried sunlight in the form of coal and oil. Today's photosynthesizers, their engines are descended from those ancient microbes, and they feed basically all of life on earth. Your heart is beating using the solar energy that some plant processed for you, and the stuff your body is made out of is made out of CO2 that some plant processed for you. Basically, we're all made out of sunlight and carbon dioxide. Fundamentally, we're just hot air.So as terrestrial beings, we're very familiar with the plants on land: the trees, the grasses, the pastures, the crops. But the oceans are filled with billions of tons of animals. Do you ever wonder what's feeding them? Well there's an invisible pasture of microscopic photosynthesizers called phytoplankton that fill the upper 200 meters of the ocean, and they feed the entire open ocean ecosystem. Some of the animals live among them and eat them, and others swim up to feed on them at night, while others sit in the deep and wait for them to die and settle down and then they chow down on them.So these tiny phytoplankton, collectively, weigh less than one percent of all the plants on land, but annually they photosynthesize as much as all of the plants on land, including the Amazon rainforest that we consider the lungs of the planet. Every year, they fix 50 billion tons of carbon in the form of carbon dioxide into their bodies that feeds the ocean ecosystem. How does this tiny amount of biomass produce as much as all the plants on land? Well, they don't have trunks and stems and flowers and fruits and all that to maintain. All they have to do is grow and divide and grow and divide. They're really lean little photosynthesis machines. They really crank.So there are thousands of different species of phytoplankton, come in all different shapes and sizes, all roughly less than the width of a human hair. Here, I'm showing you some of the more beautiful ones, the textbook versions. I call them the charismatic species of phytoplankton.And here is Prochlorococcus. I know, it just looks like a bunch of schmutz on a microscope slide.But they're in there, and I'm going to reveal them to you in a minute. But first I want to tell you how they were discovered.About 38 years ago, we were playing around with a technology in my lab called flow cytometry that was developed for biomedical research for studying cells like cancer cells, but it turns out we were using it for this off-label purpose which was to study phytoplankton, and it was beautifully suited to do that. And here's how it works: so you inject a sample in this tiny little capillary tube, and the cells go single file by a laser, and as they do, they scatter light according to their size and they emit light according to whatever pigments they might have, whether they're natural or whether you stain them. And the chlorophyl of phytoplankton, which is green, emits red light when you shine blue light on it. And so we used this instrument for several years to study our phytoplankton cultures, species like those charismatic ones that I showed you, just studying their basic cell biology. But all that time, we thought, well wouldn't it be really cool if we could take an instrument like this out on a ship and just squirt seawater through it and see what all those diversity of phytoplankton would look like. So I managed to get my hands on what we call a big rig in flow cytometry, a large, powerful laser with a money-back guarantee from the company that if it didn't work on a ship, they would take it back. And so a young scientist that I was working with at the time, Rob Olson, was able to take this thing apart, put it on a ship, put it back together and take it off to sea. And it worked like a charm. We didn't think it would, because we thought the ship's vibrations would get in the way of the focusing of the laser, but it really worked like a charm. And so we mapped the phytoplankton distributions across the ocean. For the first time, you could look at them one cell at a time in real time and see what was going on -- that was very exciting. But one day, Rob noticed some faint signals coming out of the instrument that we dismissed as electronic noise for probably a year before we realized that it wasn't really behaving like noise. It had some regular patterns to it. To make a long story short, it was tiny, tiny little cells, less than one-one hundredth the width of a human hair that contain chlorophyl. That was Prochlorococcus.So remember this slide that I showed you? If you shine blue light on that same sample, this is what you see: two tiny little red light-emitting cells. Those are Prochlorococcus. They are the smallest and most abundant photosynthetic cell on the planet. At first, we didn't know what they were, so we called the "little greens." It was a very affectionate name for them. Ultimately, we knew enough about them to give them the name Prochlorococcus, which means "primitive green berry."And it was about that time that I became so smitten by these little cells that I redirected my entire lab to study them and nothing else, and my loyalty to them has really paid off. They've given me a tremendous amount, including bringing me here.So over the years, we and others, many others, have studied Prochlorococcus across the oceans and found that they're very abundant over wide, wide ranges in the open ocean ecosystem. They're particularly abundant in what are called the open ocean gyres. These are sometimes referred to as the deserts of the oceans, but they're not deserts at all. Their deep blue water is teeming with a hundred million Prochlorococcus cells per liter. If you crowd them together like we do in our cultures, you can see their beautiful green chlorophyl. One of those test tubes has a billion Prochlorococcus in it, and as I told you earlier, there are three billion billion billion of them on the planet. That's three octillion, if you care to convert.And collectively, they weigh more than the human population and they photosynthesize as much as all of the crops on land. They're incredibly important in the global ocean. So over the years, as we were studying them and found how abundant they were, we thought, hmm, this is really strange. How can a single species be so abundant across so many different habitats? And as we isolated more into culture, we learned that they are different ecotypes. There are some that are adapted to the high-light intensities in the surface water, and there are some that are adapted to the low light in the deep ocean. In fact, those cells that live in the bottom of the sunlit zone are the most efficient photosynthesizers of any known cell. And then we learned that there are some strains that grow optimally along the equator, where there are higher temperatures, and some that do better at the cooler temperatures as you go north and south.So as we studied these more and more and kept finding more and more diversity, we thought, oh my God, how diverse are these things? And about that time, it became possible to sequence their genomes and really look under the hood and look at their genetic makeup. And we've been able to sequence the genomes of cultures that we have, but also recently, using flow cytometry, we can isolate individual cells from the wild and sequence their individual genomes, and now w've sequenced hundreds of Prochlorococcus. And although each cell has roughly 2,000 genes -- that's one tenth the size of the human genome -- as you sequence more and more, you find that they only have a thousand of those in common and the other thousand for each individual strain is drawn from an enormous gene pool, and it reflects the particular environment that the cell might have thrived in, not just high or low light or high or low temperature, but whether there are nutrients that limit them like nitrogen, phosphorus or iron. It reflects the habitat that they come from.Think of it this way. If each cell is a smartphone and the apps are the genes, when you get your smartphone, it comes with these built-in apps. Those are the ones that you can't delete if you're an iPhone person. You press on them and they don't jiggle and they don't have x's. Even if you don't want them, you can't get rid of them.Those are like the core genes of Prochlorococcus. They're the essence of the phone. But you have a huge pool of apps to draw upon to make your phone custom-designed for your particular lifestyle and habitat. If you travel a lot, you'll have a lot of travel apps, if you&`&re into financial things, you might have a lot of financial apps, or if you're like me, you probably have a lot of weather apps, hoping one of them will tell you what you want to hear.And I've learned the last couple days in Vancouver that you don't need a weather app -- you just need an umbrella. So --So just as your smartphone tells us something about how you live your life, your lifestyle, reading the genome of a Prochlorococcus cell tells us what the pressures are in its environment. It's like reading its diary, not only telling us how it got through its day or its week, but even its evolutionary history. As we studied -- I said we've sequenced hundreds of these cells, and we can now project what is the total genetic size -- gene pool -- of the Prochlorococcus federation, as we call it. It's like a superorganism. And it turns out that projections are that the collective has 80,000 genes. That's four times the size of the human genome. And it's that diversity of gene pools that makes it possible for them to dominate these large regions of the oceans and maintain their stability year in and year out.So when I daydream about Prochlorococcus, which I probably do more than is healthy --I imagine them floating out there, doing their job, maintaining the planet, feeding the animals. But also I inevitably end up thinking about what a masterpiece they are, finely tuned by millions of years of evolution. With 2,000 genes, they can do what all of our human ingenuity has not figured out how to do yet. They can take solar energy, CO2 and turn it into ch

Oceanographer Penny Chisholm tells the story of a tiny ocean creature you've probably never heard of: Prochlorococcus, the most abundant photosynthetic species on the planet. A marine microbe that has existed for billions of years, Prochlorococcus wasn't discovered until the mid-1980s -- but its ancient genetic code may hold clues to how we can reduce our dependence on fossil fuels. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Penny Chisholm, océanographe, nous présente un petit être étonnant : le Prochlorococcus, l'espèce photosynthétique la plus abondante sur la planète. Un microbe marin qui existe depuis des milliards d'années et qui n'a été découvert qu'au milieu des années 1980 -- mais son ancien code génétique pourrait contenir des indices sur la façon dont nous pourrions réduire notre dépendance aux énergies fossiles.

La oceanógrafa Penny Chisholm nos habla de un ser tan pequeño como increíble: el Prochlorococcus, la especie fotosintetizadora más abundante del planeta. Este microbio marino, que existe hace millones de años, fue descubierto recién a mediados de la década de 1980, pero su antiguo código genético puede ser la pista que nos ayude a reducir nuestra dependencia de los combustibles fósiles.

Die Ozeanografin Penny Chisholm stellt uns ein erstaunliches kleines Wesen vor: Prochlorococcus, die am üppigsten Photosynthese betreibende Art des Planeten. Die marine Mikrobe existiert seit Millionen von Jahren und wurde erst Mitte der 1980er Jahre entdeckt -- jedoch könnte ihr urzeitlicher genetischer Code den Schlüssel zu einer Reduzierung unserer Abhängigkeit von fossilen Brennstoffen enthalten.

Океанограф Пенни Чишолм познакомит нас с изумительными существами Prochlorococcus — самыми многочисленными фотосинтезирующими организмами на планете. Морской микроорганизм, просуществовавший миллиарды лет, Prochlorococcus был обнаружен лишь в середине 1980-х годов, но его древний генетический код может содержать ключ к тому, как нам уменьшить нашу зависимость от горючих ископаемых.

Oceanographer Penny Chisholm introduces us to an amazing little being: Prochlorococcus, the most abundant photosynthetic species on the planet. A marine microbe that has existed for millions of years, Prochlorococcus wasn't discovered until the mid-1980s -- but its ancient genetic code may hold clues to how we can reduce our dependence on fossil fuels.

Vincent, Elio, Michael, and Michele discuss the diel transcriptional rythmns of bacterioplankton communities in the ocean, and extensively drug resistant Pseudomonas in Ohio.

In this episode I speak to Sallie "Penny" Chisholm, the Lee and Geraldine Martin Professor of Environmental Studies at MIT. Dr. Chisholm studies photosynthesis—the way life harnesses the energy of the sun. Plants carry out photosynthesis, but so do microbes in the ocean. Dr. Chisholm studies the most abundant of these photosynthetic microbes, a species of bacteria called Prochlorococcus.  There are a trillion trillion Prochlrococcus on Earth. Dr. Chisholm researches these microbial lungs of the biosphere, and how they produce oxygen on which we depend. Along with her scientific research, Dr. Chisholm is also the author of a new children's book, Living Sunlight: How Plants Bring The Earth To Life.