X-ray nanotomography of coccolithophores reveals that coccolith mass and segment number correlate with grid size

T. Beuvier (), I. Probert, L. Beaufort, B. Suchéras-Marx, Y. Chushkin, F. Zontone and A. Gibaud ()
Additional contact information
T. Beuvier: LUNAM, IMMM, UMR 6283 CNRS, Faculté des Sciences
I. Probert: Roscoff Culture Collection, FR2424, Station Biologique de Roscoff, Place Georges Teissier
L. Beaufort: Aix Marseille Univ, CNRS, IRD, INRA, Coll France, CEREGE
B. Suchéras-Marx: Aix Marseille Univ, CNRS, IRD, INRA, Coll France, CEREGE
Y. Chushkin: European Synchrotron Radiation Facility
F. Zontone: European Synchrotron Radiation Facility
A. Gibaud: LUNAM, IMMM, UMR 6283 CNRS, Faculté des Sciences

Nature Communications, 2019, vol. 10, issue 1, 1-8

Abstract: Abstract Coccolithophores of the Noëlaerhabdaceae family are covered by imbricated coccoliths, each composed of multiple calcite crystals radially distributed around the periphery of a grid. The factors that determine coccolith size remain obscure. Here, we used synchrotron-based three-dimensional Coherent X-ray Diffraction Imaging to study coccoliths of 7 species of Gephyrocapsa, Emiliania and Reticulofenestra with a resolution close to 30 nm. Segmentation of 45 coccoliths revealed remarkable size, mass and segment number variations, even within single coccospheres. In particular, we observed that coccolith mass correlates with grid perimeter which scales linearly with crystal number. Our results indirectly support the idea that coccolith mass is determined in the coccolith vesicle by the size of the organic base plate scale (OBPS) around which R-unit nucleation occurs every 110–120 nm. The curvation of coccoliths allows inference of a positive correlation between cell nucleus, OBPS and coccolith sizes.

Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-08635-x Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:10:y:2019:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-019-08635-x

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-019-08635-x

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().