Understanding the Correlation Between the Molecular Quantitative Analysis and the Amount of Total Carbon in Phytoplankton Survey

Phytoplankton are responsible for almost half of global primary production, which is the biological driving force in marine ecosystem. Recent advancement of DNA sequencing technology enabled to analyze the phytoplankton community structure by the massive DNA sequencing from the water samples called ‘metagenomics’ or ‘metabarcoding’. Although this technique is useful to know the species composition with the relatively lower cost and labors than the traditional microscopic observation, their quantitative values and taxon coverage are still controversial. Among the currently used ‘universal’ primers for the phytoplankton taxa, we here compared the taxon coverage of ribosomal SSU and plastid LSU primers. We also analyzed the correlation between qPCR data and the amount of total carbon by the different filtration sizes (20μm, 2μm, 0.45μm). Phytoplankton community structures were analyzed using Illumina Miseq platform and their correlations to environmental condition (water temperature, salinity) were also analyzed. Increased numbers of the data in different water samples would provide a fast and convenient tool for the quantitative analysis of phytoplankton in marine ecosystem with relatively low cost and efforts as an alternative methods for the traditional phytoplankton surveys