Unveiling Trophic Functions of Uncultured Protist Taxa by Incubation Experiments in the Brackish Baltic Sea

BACKGROUND: Our knowledge of the phylogeny and diversity of aquatic protists is rapidly increasing due to molecular surveys and next-generation sequencing approaches. This has led to a considerable discrepancy between the taxa known from cultures and those known from environmental 18S rRNA gene sequences. Hence, it is generally difficult to assign ecological functions to new taxa detected by culture-independent molecular approaches. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: A combination of unamended dark incubations and 18S rRNA sequencing was chosen to link molecular diversity data of uncultured protists with heterotrophic, presumably bacterivorous, growth. The incubations, conducted with Baltic Sea brackish water, resulted in a consistent shift from a protistan community dominated by phototrophs to one in which heterotrophs predominated. This was determined on the basis of cell abundance and 18S rRNA sequences derived from fingerprint analysis and clone libraries. The bulk of enriched phylotypes after incubation were related to hitherto uncultured marine taxa within chrysophytes, ochrophytes, choanoflagellates, cercozoans, and picobiliphytes, mostly represented in recently established or here defined environmental clades. Their growth in the dark, together with coinciding results from studies with a similar objective, provides evidence that these uncultured taxa represent heterotrophic or mixotrophic species. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: These findings shed some light into the trophic role of diverse uncultured protists especially within functionally heterogeneous groups (e.g., chrysophytes, ochrophytes) and groups that appear to be puzzling with regard to their nutrition (picobiliphytes). Additionally, our results indicate that the heterotrophic flagellate community in the southwestern Baltic Sea is dominated by species of marine origin. The combination of unamended incubations with molecular diversity analysis is thus confirmed as a promising approach to explore the trophic mode of environmentally relevant protist taxa for which only sequence data are currently available.