| Budget Amount *help |
¥23,530,000 (Direct Cost: ¥18,100,000、Indirect Cost: ¥5,430,000)
Fiscal Year 2017: ¥1,300,000 (Direct Cost: ¥1,000,000、Indirect Cost: ¥300,000)
Fiscal Year 2016: ¥4,290,000 (Direct Cost: ¥3,300,000、Indirect Cost: ¥990,000)
Fiscal Year 2015: ¥17,940,000 (Direct Cost: ¥13,800,000、Indirect Cost: ¥4,140,000)
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| Outline of Final Research Achievements |
It is known that picocynobacteria Prochlorococcus spp. are highly dominant in the low to mid latitudal oligotrophic ocean; yet, importantly, because they are conspicuously minute coccoids down to < 0.6 μm in diameter, a classical paradigm on the marine food web is unlikely to be applied where phytoplankton would have to be grazed by multicellular filter-feeders. In the present study, I hypothesized that the direct consumers of those picoplanktons should be phagotrophic protists that thus supplies energy derived from the photosynthesis of those minute producers to larger organisms. We tested this hypothesis by particularly paying attention to catabolites of divinylchlorophylls, unique photosynthetic pigments of Prochlorococcus, that are expected to be generated by the predatory process of picocyanobacteria-feeding protists.
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