Colonization and release processes of viruses and prokaryotes on artificial marine macroaggregates.

Marine organic aggregates are sites of high of viral accumulation; however, still little is known about their colonization processes and interactions with their local bacterial hosts. By taking advantage of a novel approach (paramagnetic functionalized microsphere method) to create and incubate artificial macroaggregates, we examined the small-scale movements of viruses and bacteria between such marine snow particles and the surrounding water. The examination of the codynamics of both free-living and attached viral and bacterial abundance, over 12 hours of incubation in virus-free water, suggests that aggregates are rather comparable to viral factories than to viral traps where a significant part of the virions production might be locally diverted to the water column.

Interactive effects of viral and bacterial production on marine bacterial diversity.

A general model of species diversity predicts that the latter is maximized when productivity and disturbance are balanced. Based on this model, we hypothesized that the response of bacterial diversity to the ratio of viral to bacterial production (VP/BP) would be dome-shaped. In order to test this hypothesis, we obtained data on changes in bacterial communities (determined by terminal restriction fragment length polymorphism of 16S rRNA gene) along a wide VP/BP gradient (more than two orders of magnitude), using seawater incubations from NW Mediterranean surface waters, i.

A preliminary study on metal and nutrient concentrations in running water systems in southern New Caledonia.

Metal and nutrient concentrations were measured in five running water sampling sites of New Caledonia. Metal concentrations were homogeneous (Ni; 22.7-50.