Relationships between phytoplankton pigments and DNA- or RNA-based abundances support ecological applications

Abstract

Observations of phytoplankton abundances and community structure are critical towards understanding marine ecosystems. Common approaches to determine group-specific abundances include measuring phytoplankton pigments with high-performance liquid chromatography and DNA-based metabarcoding. Increasingly, mRNA abundances with metatranscriptomics are also employed. As phytoplankton pigments are used to develop and validate remote sensing algorithms, further comparisons between pigments and other metrics are needed to validate the extent to which these measurements agree for group-specific abundances; however, most previous comparisons have been hindered by metabarcoding and metatranscriptomics solely producing relative abundance data. By employing quantitative approaches that express both 18S rRNA genes (DNA) and total mRNA as concentrations, we show that these measurements are related for several eukaryotic phytoplankton groups. We further propose that integration of these can be used to examine ecological patterns more deeply. For example, productivity-diversity relationships of both the whole community and individual groups show a dinoflagellate-driven negative trend rather than the commonly found unimodal pattern. Pigments are also shown to relate to certain harmful algal bloom-forming taxa as well as the expression of sets of genes. Altogether, these results suggest that potential models of pigment concentrations via hyperspectral remote sensing may enable improved assessments of global phytoplankton community structure. These assessments may further support the detection of harmful algal blooms and the development of Earth system models.