Qianqian Zhang

• phd
• Research Assistant at Chinese Academy of Sciences

Mariculture exerts a direct influence on planktonic eukaryotic microorganisms protists. Previous studies have focused on phytoplankton, while the heterotrophic and parasitic protistan groups are unknown. Currently, in Muping Marine Ranch (MR) which is along the littoral zone of northern Yellow Sea of China, environmental DNA methods were employed t...

We investigated spatial heterogeneity and diel variations in bacterioplankton and pico-nanoeukaryote communities, and potential biotic interactions at the extinction stage of the Ulva prolifera bloom in the Jiaozhou Bay, Yellow Sea. It was found that the presence of Ulva canopies significantly promoted the cell abundance of heterotrophic bacteria,...

Coastal and estuarine protists are frequently exposed to salinity undulation. While the tolerance and stress responses of microalgae to salinity have been extensively studied, there have been scarce studies on the physiological response of heterotrophic protists to salinity stressing. In this study, we investigated the physiological response of the...

The increasing prevalence of antibiotics in seawater across global coastal areas, coupled with the ocean acidi-fication induced by climate change, present a multifaceted challenge to marine ecosystems, particularly impacting the key physiological processes of marine organisms. Apoptosis is a critical adaptive response essential for maintaining cell...

Microbes in marine sediments constitute up to five-sixths of the planet’s total biomass, but their diversity is little explored, especially for those forming associations with unicellular protists. Heterotrophic ciliates are among the most dominant and diversified marine benthic protists and comprise hotspot niches of bacterial colonization. To dat...

Deltamethrin (DLM), a broad-spectrum pesticide, has been proven to have toxic effects on aquatic organisms. Here, we detected the formation of extracellular traps (ETosis) formation in Manila clam (Ruditapes philippinarum) hemocytes stimulated by three concentrations of DLM (0.01, 0.1 and 1 μg/mL) in vitro, and explored the underlying mechanisms in...

Ocean acidification (OA) and antibiotic pollution pose severe threats to the fitness of keystone species in marine ecosystems. However, the combined effects of OA and antibiotic pollution on the intestinal microbiota of marine organisms are still not well known. In this study, we exposed the herbivorous gastropod Trochus niloticus, a keystone speci...

The interactive effects of ocean acidification (OA) and copper (Cu) ions on the mussel Mytilus galloprovincialis are not well understood. The underlying mechanisms also remain obscure. In this study, individuals of M. galloprovincialis were exposed for 28 days to 25 μg/L and 50 μg/L Cu ions at two pH levels (ambient level - pH 8.1; acidified level...

The interactions between symbiotic bacterial consortia and their protist hosts in benthic environments have attracted increasing interest in recent years. In the present study, we investigated the diversity of potentially associated bacteria for an astomatous ciliate, Kentrophoros flavus, collected in the intertidal zone of Yantai, China. For the f...

Corals influence microorganisms within the surrounding seawater, yet the diversities and functions of seawater bacteria and microeukaryotes in coral-reef systems have not been well addressed. We collected 40 seawater samples in outer coral reef flats and semi-closed inner lagoons from the surface, middle and bottom layers in the pristine coral-reef...

The comparison of trophic structure and energy flow between natural and artificial reefs is imperative to evaluate whether these man-made structures work similarly to comparable natural reefs. Here, to characterize the potential difference in functioning between two types of reef ecosystems, two trophic models (Ecopath) at an artificial reef and an...

Three Dysteria species, D. crassipes Claparède & Lachmann, 1859; D. brasiliensis Faria et al., 1922; and D. paracrassipes n. sp., were collected from subtropical coastal waters of the East China Sea, near Ningbo, China. The three species were studied based on their living morphology, infraciliature, and molecular data. The new species D. paracrassi...

To accurately predict the fitness of marine ectotherms under the climate change scenarios, interactive effects from multiple environmental stressors should be considered, such as ocean acidification (OA), ocean warming (OW) and diurnal temperature cycling (DTC). In this work, we evaluated and compared the antioxidant capacity and metabolism homeost...

Okadaic acid (OA), produced by dinoflagellates during harmful algal blooms, is a principal diarrhetic shellfish poisoning toxin. This toxin poses a potential threat to bivalves with economic values. To better understand the toxicity mechanism of OA to bivalves, in this study, oxidative stress biomarkers (superoxide dismutase, SOD; catalase, CAT; gl...

Relationships between ribotypic and phenotypic traits of protists across life-cycle stages remain largely unknown. Herein, we used single cells of two soil and two marine ciliate species to examine phenotypic and ribotypic traits and their relationships across lag, log, plateau, cystic stages and temperatures. We found that Colpoda inflata and C. s...

Hypoxia, largely triggered by anthropogenic activities and global climate change, exerts widespread and expanding stress on marine ecosystems. As an emerging contaminant, the influence of nanoplastics on marine organisms has also attracted attention in recent years. However, the impact of hypoxia on the risk assessments of nanoplastics is rarely co...

In the present study, Bacillus velezensis (BV007, CGMCC No. 20039) was isolated from the gut of Litopenaeus vannamei, and the effects of BV007 on the growth performance, immune responses, and intestine microbiota of the shrimp were investigated. A total of 1,200 healthy shrimp (3.0 ± 0.3 cm, 0.32 ± 0.8 g) were randomly divided into four groups, and...

Although defensins have been isolated from a variety of metazoan, their role in cellular immunity has not been answered. In the study, we found that the hemocytes of the Manila clams Ruditapes philippinarum release defensin (designated as Rpdef3) in response to Vibrio parahaemolyticus challenge. The antimicrobial Rpdef3 was proved to be involved in...

Large reef-associated predatory fishes play important roles in aquatic ecosystem along coast because of their ecological functions and economic values to recreational and commercial fisheries. This study was carried out to assess the function of artificial reefs as alternative habitats for two common reef-associated predatory fishes in the north of...

Scientific researches have clearly indicated that ocean acidification and warming poses serious threats to coral reef ecosystems. In coral reef ecosystems, herbivorous gastropods have an important function in maintaining the stability of the ecosystem due to controlling the abundance and growth of macroalgal, which compete for nutrients and space w...

The formation of extracellular traps (ETs) is an important innate immune mechanism that serves to combat different invading pathogens. In this study, zymosan significantly induced the formation of ETs in the hemocytes of Ruditapes philippinarum, and this effect was accompanied by translocation of the mitochondria to the cell surface. Zymosan stimul...

Extracellular traps (ETs) have been found to be an important strategy of mammals to immobilize and kill invading microorganisms. In the present study, we observed the formation of ETs in the hemocytes of marine mollusks Ruditapes philippinarum in response to challenge from bacteria Vibrio anguillarum, and examined the potential factors and signalin...

In recent decades, the marine environment has been seriously affected by various anthropogenic activities (e.g., deforestation, fossil fuel combustion, and disordered discharges of pollutants). As a consequence, a range of changes in seawater environmental factors have taken place in oceans around the world, including increased temperature, reduced...

Background: Heterotrichous ciliates are common members of microeukaryote communities which play important roles in both the transfer of material and the flow of energy in aquatic food webs. This group has been known for over two centuries due to their large body size and cosmopolitan distribution. Nevertheless, species identification and phylogene...

The morphology and phylogeny of two metopid ciliates, collected from anaerobic habitats in China, were investigated using live observation, protargol staining method, and SSU rDNA sequencing. The new species Metopus paravestitus nov. spec. can be distinguished by a combination of the following features: oblong cell with densely arranged ectobiotic...

Digestion-resistant bacteria (DRB) refer to the ecological bacterial group that can be ingested, but not digested by protistan grazers, thus forming a specific type of bacteria-protist association. To test the hypothesis that the environment affects the assembly of DRB in protists, a mixotrophic ciliate, Paramecium bursaria, and a heterotrophic cil...

Bacterivory is an important ecological function of protists in natural ecosystems. However, there are diverse bacterial species resistant to protistan digestion, which reduces the carbon flow to higher trophic levels. So far, a molecular biological view of metabolic processes in heterotrophic protists during predation of bacterial preys of differen...

Background Heterotrichous ciliates are common members of microeukaryote communities which play important roles in the transfer of material and energy flow in aquatic food webs. This group has been known over two centuries due to their large body size and cosmopolitan distribution. Nevertheless, species identification and phylogenetic relationships...

Background: Heterotrichous ciliates are common members of microeukaryote communities which play important roles in both the transfer of material and the flow of energy in aquatic food webs. This group has been known for over two centuries due to their large body size and cosmopolitan distribution. Nevertheless, species identification and phylogenet...

Four epibiotic sessilid peritrichs, i.e., Zoothamnium wilberti n. sp., Baikalonis microdiscus n. sp., Epistylis anastatica (Linnaeus, 1767) Ehrenberg, 1830, and Rhabdostyla commensalisMöbius, 1888, were isolated from one syllid polychaete and three crustacean hosts in Qingdao, China. For each species, specimens were observed both in vivo and follow...

Ciliated protists (ciliates) are widely used for investigating evolution, mostly due to their successful radiation after their early evolutionary branching. In this study, we employed high-throughput sequencing technology to reveal the phylogenetic position of Synhymenia, as well as two classes Nassophorea and Phyllopharyngea, which have been a lon...

Bactericidal permeability-increasing protein (BPI) is an antimicrobial protein with potent endotoxin-neutralising activity and plays a crucial role in innate immunity against bacterial infection. In the present study, a bpi (designed as rpbpi) was identified and characterized from manila clam Ruditapes philippinarum. Multiple alignments and phyloge...

In the present study, a macin was cloned and characterized from clam Venerupis philippinarum (designed as VpMacin). The full-length cDNA of VpMacin was of 579 bp, encoding a peptide of 87 amino acids with the predicted molecular weight of 9.7 kDa. Analysis of the conserved domain suggested that VpMacin was a new member of the macin family. In non-s...

This study explored the molecular diversity and biogeography of benthic ciliates in Chinese marginal seas, the Bohai Sea (BHS), North Yellow Sea (NYS) and South Yellow Sea (SYS). From a previous 18S rRNA gene pyrosequencing dataset of the benthic microeukaryotes, we retrieved the sequences affiliated with phylum Ciliophora and analyzed alpha and be...

Peptidoglycan recognition proteins (PGRPs) are important pattern recognition receptors in the innate immune system of invertebrates. In the study, a short PGRP (designed as RpPGRP) was identified and characterized from the manila clam Ruditapes philippinarum. The open reading frame of RpPGRP encoded a polypeptide of 249-amino acids with a calculate...

Fas-associated protein with death domain (FADD) is an essential element in cell death, and also implicates in cell cycle progression, inflammation and innate immunity. In the study, an FADD (designated as RpFADD) was identified and characterized from manila clam, Ruditapes philippinarum. Multiple alignments and phylogenetic analysis strongly sugges...

This revision of the classification of eukaryotes follows that of Adl et al., 2012[J. Euk. Microbiol.59(5)] and retains an emphasis on protists. Changes since have improved the resolution of many nodes in phylogenetic analyses. For some clades even families are being clearly resolved. As we had predicted,environmental sampling in the intervening ye...

This revision of the classification of eukaryotes follows that of Adl et al., 2012 [J. Euk. Microbiol. 59(5)] and retains an emphasis on protists. Changes since have improved the resolution of many nodes in phylogenetic analyses. For some clades even families are being clearly resolved. As we had predicted, environmental sampling in the intervening...

Marine benthic nitrogen (N)-cycling may vary widely across space and seasons; it is thus needed to make high-resolution estimations of these important ecosystem processes with a reasonable number of variables. In this study, we determined the benthic denitrification and anammox potentials in two basins, the Bohai Sea (BS) and the North Yellow Sea (...

Seawater acidification (OA) and cadmium (Cd) has the potential to lead to immunosuppression effect on marine bivalves. However, the interaction between these two environmental stressors on immune system of marine bivalves has received limited attention. In order to evaluate the defense responses of oysters under the combined exposure to OA and cadm...

Defensins are small cysteine-rich cationic proteins that are ubiquitously present in both vertebrates and invertebrates and constitute the front line of host innate immunity. In the present study, a defensin-like antimicrobial peptide (designed as RpdefB) was identified and characterized from the manila clam Ruditapes philippinarum. The open readin...

High‐throughput sequencing (HTS) surveys, among the most common approaches currently used in environmental microbiology, require reliable reference databases to be correctly interpreted. The EukRef Initiative (eukref.org) is a community effort to manually screen available small subunit (SSU) rRNA gene sequences and produce a public, high‐quality, a...

Evolutionary relationships of taxa within the ciliate subclass Haptoria are poorly understood. In this study, we broaden the taxon sampling by adding 14 small subunit ribosomal RNA gene sequences, 13 large subunit ribosomal RNA gene sequences and 13 ITS1-5.8S-ITS2 gene sequences of haptorians. This includes the first molecular data from two genera,...

The morphologies of two novel ciliates, Arcanisutura chongmingiensis n. gen., n. sp. and Naxella paralucida n. sp., collected from Shanghai, China, have been investigated using live observation and silver staining methods. Arcanisutura n. gen. can be easily distinguished from related genera by its inconspicuous, oblique anterior suture. Arcanisutur...

WE (Shao et al.) established a new genus and described the morphology, cell division, and phylogeny of a Chinese population of a hypotrichous ciliate in this electronic-only journal. Since this work does not contain a ZooBank registration, it is not published in the sense of nomenclature (ICZN, Articles 8.5, 9.11), that is, it is not a work in whic...

Due to complex morphological and convergent morphogenetic characters, systematics of ciliates has long been ambiguous. Since 1990, Laboratory of Protozoology, Ocean University of China, in collaboration with other research groups worldwide, has carried out a series of integrative investigations on ciliate systematics. To date, genomic DNA has been...

Many anaerobic microbial parasites possess highly modified mitochondria known as mitochondrion-related organelles (MROs). The best-studied of these are the hydrogenosomes of Trichomonas vaginalis and Spironucleus salmonicida, which produce ATP anaerobically through substrate-level phosphorylation with concomitant hydrogen production; and the mitoso...

The morphology and infraciliature of a new ciliate, Metopus yantaiensis n. sp., discovered in coastal soil of northern China, were investigated. It is distinguished from its congeners by a combination of the following features: nuclear apparatus situated in the preoral dome; 18--21 somatic ciliary rows, of which three extend onto the preoral dome (...

Peritrich ciliates are highly diverse and can be important bacterial grazers in aquatic ecosystems. Morphological identifications of peritrich species and assemblages in the environment are time-consuming and expertise-demanding. In this study, two peritrich-specific PCR primers were newly designed to amplify a fragment including the internal trans...

To improve understanding of diversity, phylogeny, and evolution in tintinnid ciliates, it is essential to link multiple molecular markers with properly identified and documented morphospecies. Accordingly, 54 tintinnid morphospecies/isolates mainly from the Yellow and East China Seas were collected and analysed. Using single-cell approaches, sequen...

The phylum Ciliophora plays important roles in a wide range of biological studies. However, the evolutionary relationships of many groups remain unclear due to a lack of sufficient molecular data. In this study, molecular dataset was expanded with representatives from 55 orders and all major lineages. The main findings are: (1) 14 classes were reco...

Protistan bacterivory, a microbial process involving ingestion and digestion, is ecologically important in the microbial loop in aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems. While bacterial resistance to protistan ingestion has been relatively well understood, little is known about protistan digestion in which some ingested bacteria could not be digested in...

The living morphology and infraciliature of a new marine prostomatid, Metacystis similis nov. Spec., have been observed and investigated. Based on both morphological and molecular biological data, several closely-related and easily confused taxa were compared. The diagnosis for this new taxon: cylindrical marine Metacystis with a slightly blunt ant...

Seagrass colonization changes the chemistry and biogeochemical cycles mediated by microbes in coastal sediments. In this study, we molecularly characterized the diazotrophic assemblages and entire bacterial community in surface sediments of a Zostera marina-colonized coastal lagoon in northern China. Higher nitrogenase gene (nifH) copy numbers were...

Trimastigids are free-living, anaerobic protists that are closely related to the symbiotic oxymonads, forming together the taxon Preaxostyla (Excavata: Metamonada). We isolated fourteen new strains morphologically corresponding to two species assigned to Trimastix (until now the only genus of trimastigids), Trimastix marina and Trimastix pyriformis...

The planktonic and benthic fungi in a sea cucumber farming system were simultaneously investigated on three sampling dates. Analyses of SSU rRNA gene libraries of four samples revealed 131 fungal operational taxonomic units, of which 58% were potentially novel. Chytridiomycota, Blastocladiomycota and Monoblepharidomycota were detected only from sed...

A hypotrichous ciliate, Paracladotricha salina n. g., n. sp., was discovered in hypersaline waters (salinity about 80‰) from Qingdao, China. Its morphology and some major ontogenetic stages were studied and the phylogenetic position was estimated using standard methods. Paracladotricha salina is characterized by a flexible, more or less slender bod...

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The ciliate subclass Haptoria is a diverse taxon that includes most of the free-living predators in the class Litostomatea. Phylogenetic study of this group was initially conducted using a single molecular marker small-subunit ribosomal RNA (SSU rRNA genes). Multi-gene analysis has been limited because very few other sequences were available. We pe...