Popson, D.; D’Silva, S.; Wheeless, K.; Morgan-Kiss, R. Permanent Stress Adaptation and Unexpected High Light Tolerance in the Shade-Adapted Chlamydomonas priscui. Plants2024, 13, 2254.
Popson, D.; D’Silva, S.; Wheeless, K.; Morgan-Kiss, R. Permanent Stress Adaptation and Unexpected High Light Tolerance in the Shade-Adapted Chlamydomonas priscui. Plants 2024, 13, 2254.
Popson, D.; D’Silva, S.; Wheeless, K.; Morgan-Kiss, R. Permanent Stress Adaptation and Unexpected High Light Tolerance in the Shade-Adapted Chlamydomonas priscui. Plants2024, 13, 2254.
Popson, D.; D’Silva, S.; Wheeless, K.; Morgan-Kiss, R. Permanent Stress Adaptation and Unexpected High Light Tolerance in the Shade-Adapted Chlamydomonas priscui. Plants 2024, 13, 2254.
Abstract
The Antarctic photopsychrophile, Chlamydomonas priscuii UWO241 is adapted to extreme environmental conditions, including permanent low temperatures, high salt and shade. During long-term exposure to this extreme habitat, UWO241 appears to have lost several short-term mechanisms in favor of constitutive protection against environmental stress. This study investigated physiological and growth responses of UWO241 to high light conditions, evaluating the impacts of long-term acclimation to high light, low temperature, and high salinity on its ability to manage short-term photoinhibition. We found that UWO241 significantly increased its growth rate and photosynthetic activity at growth irradiances far exceeding native light conditions. Furthermore, UWO241 exhibited robust protection against short-term photoinhibition, particularly in photosystem I. Last, pre-acclimation to high light or low temperatures, but not high salinity, enhanced photoinhibition tolerance. These findings extend our understanding for stress tolerance in extremophilic algae. In the past 2 decades climate change-related increasing glacial stream flow has perturbed long-term stable conditions: in the form of has been associated with lake level rise, thinning of ice covers, and expansion of ice-free perimeters. Our findings have implications on phytoplankton survival and response to change scenarios in the light-limited environment of Antarctic ice-covered lakes.
Keywords
photoinhibition; photo-acclimation; extremophile; cyclic electron flow; environmental change
Subject
Biology and Life Sciences, Plant Sciences
Copyright:
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
