Hanno Teeling

Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology | MPI · Group of Microbial Genomics

The β-(1,3)-glucan laminarin functions as storage polysaccharide in marine stramenophiles such as diatoms. Laminarin is abundant, water-soluble and structured simply, making it an attractive substrate for marine bacteria. As a consequence, many marine bacteria have developed competitive strategies to scavenge and decompose laminarin, which involves...

Phytoplankton blooms initiate bacterioplankton blooms, from which bacterial biomass is released via grazing zooplankton and viral lysis. Bacterial consumption of algal biomass during blooms is well studied, but little is known about the simultaneous reuse of bacterial necromass. Alpha- and beta-glucans are abundant dissolved organic macromolecules...

The phycosphere that surrounds algae is teeming with microbial life. Some of these microbes are capable of industrially useful functions, such as breaking down biomass. To explore this often-overlooked microbiome, researchers conducted the largest ever phycospheric survey of green, brown, and red algae in China. The team discovered 14 genera that,...

Background Macroalgal epiphytic microbial communities constitute a rich resource for novel enzymes and compounds, but studies so far largely focused on tag-based microbial diversity analyses or limited metagenome sequencing of single macroalgal species. Results We sampled epiphytic bacteria from specimens of Ulva sp. (green algae), Saccharina sp....

Background Blooms of marine microalgae play a pivotal role in global carbon cycling. Such blooms entail successive blooms of specialized clades of planktonic bacteria that collectively remineralize gigatons of algal biomass on a global scale. This biomass is largely composed of distinct polysaccharides, and the microbial decomposition of these poly...

Blooms of marine microalgae play a pivotal role in global carbon cycling. Such blooms entail successive blooms of specialized clades of planktonic bacteria that remineralize algal biomass. We investigated the bacterioplankton response to a bloom in the German Bight in spring 2020. Metagenome sequencing at 30 time-points allowed reconstruction of 25...

Microbial glycan degradation is essential to global carbon cycling. The marine bacterium Salegentibacter sp. Hel_I_6 (Bacteroidota) isolated from seawater off Helgoland island (North Sea) contains an α-mannan inducible gene cluster with a GH76 family endo-α-1,6-mannanase (ShGH76). This cluster is related to genetic loci employed by human gut bacter...

Background The planktonic bacterial community associated with spring phytoplankton blooms in the North Sea is responsible for a large amount of carbon turnover in an environment characterised by high primary productivity. Individual clades belonging to the Gammaproteobacteria have shown similar population dynamics to Bacteroidetes species , and are...

Algal blooms produce large quantities of organic matter that is subsequently remineralised by bacterial heterotrophs. Polysaccharide is a primary component of algal biomass. It has been hypothesised that individual bacterial heterotrophic niches during algal blooms are in part determined by the available polysaccharide substrates present. Measureme...

The formation of sinking particles in the ocean, which promote carbon sequestration into deeper water and sediments, involves algal polysaccharides acting as an adhesive, binding together molecules, cells and minerals. These as yet unidentified adhesive polysaccharides must resist degradation by bacterial enzymes or else they dissolve and particles...

Massive releases of organic substrates during marine algal blooms trigger growth of many clades of heterotrophic bacteria. Algal polysaccharides represent the most diverse and structurally complex class of these substrates, yet their role in shaping the microbial community composition is poorly understood. We investigated, whether polysaccharide ut...

Since the discovery of archaeoplankton in 1992, the euryarchaeotal Marine Group II (MGII) remains uncultured and less understood than other planktonic archaea. We characterized the seasonal dynamics of MGII populations in the southern North Sea on a genomic and microscopic level over the course of four years. We recovered 34 metagenome-assembled ge...

We investigated Bacteroidetes during spring algae blooms in the southern North Sea in 2010–2012 using a time series of 38 deeply sequenced metagenomes. Initial partitioning yielded 6455 bins, from which we extracted 3101 metagenome-assembled genomes (MAGs) including 1286 Bacteroidetes MAGs covering ~120 mostly uncultivated species. We identified 13...

Epibacterium mobile BBCC367 is a marine bacterium that is common in coastal areas. It belongs to the Roseobacter clade, a widespread group in pelagic marine ecosystems. Species of the Roseobacter clade are regularly used as models to understand the evolution and physiological adaptability of generalist bacteria. E. mobile BBCC367 comprises two chro...

Marine microscopic algae carry out about half of the global carbon dioxide fixation into organic matter. They provide organic substrates for marine microbes such as members of the Bacteroidetes that degrade algal polysaccharides using carbohydrate‐active enzymes (CAZymes). In Bacteroidetes genomes CAZyme encoding genes are mostly grouped in distinc...

Marine algae convert a substantial fraction of fixed carbon dioxide into various polysaccharides. Flavobacteriia that are specialized on algal polysaccharide degradation feature genomic clusters termed polysaccharide utilization loci (PULs). As knowledge on extant PUL diversity is sparse, we sequenced the genomes of 53 North Sea Flavobacteriia and...

Microbial degradation of algal biomass following spring phytoplankton blooms has been characterised as a concerted effort among multiple clades of heterotrophic bacteria. Despite their significance to overall carbon turnover, many of these clades have resisted cultivation. One clade known from 16S rRNA gene sequencing surveys at Helgoland in the No...

Polysaccharide degradation by heterotrophic microbes is a key process within Earth’s carbon cycle. Here, we use environmental proteomics and metagenomics in combination with cultivation experiments and biochemical characterizations to investigate the molecular details of in situ polysaccharide degradation mechanisms during microalgal blooms. For th...

Temperate coastal marine environments are replete with complex biotic and abiotic interactions that are amplified during spring and summer phytoplankton blooms. During these events, heterotrophic bacterioplankton respond to successional releases of dissolved organic matter as algal cells are lysed. Annual seasonal shifts in the community compositio...

Gammaproteobacterial Reinekea spp. were detected during North Sea spring algae blooms in the years 2009-2012, with relative abundances of up to 16% in the bacterioplankton. Here we explore the ecophysiology of 'R. forsetii' strain Hel1_31_D35 that was isolated during the 2010 spring bloom using (i) its manually annotated, high-quality closed genome...

The marine flavobacterium Zobellia galactanivorans DsijT was isolated from a red alga and by now constitutes a model for studying algal polysaccharide bioconversions. We present an in-depth analysis of its complete genome and link it to physiological traits. Z. galactanivorans exhibited the highest gene numbers for glycoside hydrolases, polysacchar...

Marine Bacteroidetes have pronounced capabilities of degrading high molecular weight organic matter such as proteins and polysaccharides. Previously we reported on 76 Bacteroidetes-affiliated fosmids from the North Atlantic Ocean's boreal polar and oligotrophic subtropical provinces. Here we report on the analysis of further 174 fosmids from the sa...

Spearman rank correlations of abundant Bacteroidetes clades to phytoplankton groups. Correlation values were considered only when p-value <0.05. Spearman rank correlations measure the strength of association between two ranked variables. A precondition (assumption) for this nonparametric statistical analysis is that the two variables share a monoto...

E-value thresholds used for automated CAZyme family detection. Searches were performed against the CAZy database, the dbCAN database and the Pfam database using E-value thresholds that were adjusted for each family by extensive manual annotations. CAZymes were only annotated when at least two of the three database searches yielded positive results...

Physicochemical parameters. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.11888.011

Cell counts of dominating phytoplankton. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.11888.012

Total cell and CARD-FISH cell counts of bacterioplankton. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.11888.013

Linear regression analyses were computed in order to test, whether the abundances of major clades of Flavobacteriia were influenced by abiotic factors or by abundant algae groups. For all tested clades of Flavobacteriia, multiple abiotic factors and multiple algae groups were obtained as explanatory variables. The strongest abiotic predictors were...

Specific oligonucleotide probes used for quantification of free-living (0.2 - 3 µm) bacterioplankton populations by fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH). DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.11888.014

Abundance matrix of the 16S rRNA gene tag sequence analysis. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.11888.015

Statistics of the 16 metagenomes from free-living (0.2 - 3.0 µm) North Sea bacterioplankton that were used in this study. Two additional metagenomes are listed in italics for completeness, one from a test run sampled on August 21th, 2008, and a metagenome of particle-attached (3 - 10 µm) bacterioplankton sampled on April 14th, 2009. DOI: http://dx....

Sizes in basepairs of the metagenome taxonomic bins that were used for CAZyme frequency analyses on order to genus level. Taxonomic bins with too small sizes for a sound analysis were excluded (red text). DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.11888.020

Primary production by blooming algae can triggers consecutive blooms of distinct clades of planktonic bacteria. By combined metaproteome and metagenome analyses we found indications for resource partitioning between abundant clades of Flavobacteriia and Gammaproteobacteria during a North Sea spring algae bloom in 2009 [1]. Our data suggest that mem...

The dynamics of coastal marine microbial communities are driven by seasonally changing abiotic and biotic factors as well as by rapidly occurring short-term changes such as river fresh-water influxes or phytoplankton blooms. We examined the variability of the free-living bacterioplankton at Helgoland Roads (German Bight, North Sea) over a period of...

Introduction: In 2009 we investigated the response of bacterioplankton to the release of algal-derived organic compounds during a spring phytoplankton bloom in the North Sea. We observed a swift succession of distinct bacterioplankton clades with different ecological niches, likely due to changes in substrate availability over time [1]. Within the...

Members of the flavobacterial genus Polaribacter thrive in response to North Sea spring phytoplankton blooms. We analyzed two respective Polaribacter species by whole genome sequencing, comparative genomics, substrate tests and proteomics. Both can degrade algal polysaccharides but occupy distinct niches. The liquid culture isolate Polaribacter sp....

A recent investigation of bacterioplankton communities in the German Bight towards the end of a diatom-dominated spring phytoplankton bloom revealed pronounced successions of distinct bacterial clades. A combination of metagenomics and metaproteomics indicated that these clades had distinct substrate spectra and consumed different algal substrates....

Euryarchaea from the genus Halorhabdus have been found in hypersaline habitats worldwide, yet are represented by only two isolates: H. utahensis AX-2T from the shallow Great Salt Lake of Utah, and H. tiamatea SARL4BT from the Shaban deep-sea hypersaline anoxic lake (DHAL) in the Red Sea. We sequenced the H. tiamatea genome to elucidate its niche ad...