F. vesiculosus responded quickly to rapid shifts in irradiance resulting in a highly dynamic microenvironment around and within its thallus. In combination with detailed morphological studies and molecular

approaches, microsensors offer a promising toolbox to quantitatively describe structural and functional adaptations of macroalgae to environmental conditions, such as flow and light climate, as well as their physiological responses to environmental stressors. GSK-3 activity “
“An equation for the rate of photosynthesis as a function of irradiance introduced by T. T. Bannister included an empirical parameter b to account for observed variations in curvature between the initial slope and the maximum rate of photosynthesis. Yet researchers have generally favored

equations with fixed curvature, possibly because b was viewed as having no physiological meaning. We developed an analytic photosynthesis-irradiance equation relating variations in curvature to changes in the degree of connectivity between photosystems, and also considered a recently published alternative, based on changes in the size of the plastoquinone pool. When fitted to a set of 185 observed photosynthesis-irradiance curves, it was found that the Bannister equation provided the best fit more frequently compared to either of the analytic equations. While Bannister’s curvature parameter Ridaforolimus in vivo engendered negligible improvement in the statistical fit to the study data, we argued that the parameter is nevertheless quite useful because it allows for consistent estimates of initial slope and saturation irradiance for observations exhibiting a range of curvatures, which would otherwise have to be fitted to different fixed-curvature equations. Using theoretical models, we also found that intra- and intercellular self-shading can result in biased estimates of both curvature

and the saturation irradiance parameter. We concluded that Bannister’s is the best currently available equation accounting for variations in curvature precisely because it Amylase does not assign inappropriate physiological meaning to its curvature parameter, and we proposed that b should be thought of as the expression of the integration of all factors impacting curvature. “
“Dinoflagellates are the most abundant protists that produce bioluminescence. Currently, there is an incomplete knowledge of the identity of bioluminescent species arising from inter- and intraspecific variability in bioluminescence properties. In this study, PCR primers were designed to amplify the dinoflagellate luciferase gene (lcf) from genetically distant bioluminescent species. One of the primer pairs was “universal,” whereas others amplified longer gene sequences from subsets of taxa.