Photo credit: Wenche Eikrem

CCMP2436 has been sequenced as part of the Arctic Chromist project which includes 5 nanoflagellates from divergent lineages. All of these algae were isolated from the same region of the Arctic and a goal of the project was to investigate the potential for genetic signatures of algae living under perennially cold conditions. The samples for isolation were collected during the Arctic summer with 24h of light as part of the North Water Polynya Study (NOW) in Northern Baffin Bay. The surface waters of Northern Baffin Bay, which is between Greenland and Ellesmere Island, are typically from  -1.7 – 2 °C.  All algae were isolated using a dilution technique where subsamples of starting sample were placed initially in 6- or 12-well multiwell plates and transferred to different media when swimming cells were detected using an inverted microscope. Resulting unialgal cultures have been maintained in natural aged and filtered seawater amended with standard media.

The haptophyte (CCMP2436) was originally isolated from a water sample collected from 11 m depth  in June 1998 (76.3208° N  75.8172° W). The water was collected directly form the Niskin bottle mounted on a CTD Rosette system on the Canadian Coast Icebreaker Pierre Radisson and placed into a 50 ml Falcon tube and kept at 4 °C under blue light until returned to the land-based laboratory a few weeks later. The culture has been maintained in seawater at a salinity of 30. Haptophyceae are phylogenetically and morphologically diverse, and include coccolithophorids such as Emiliania and also non-coccolith species in several orders including the Pavlovales. The 18S rRNA phylogeny indicates that CCMP2436 groups with but branches apart from described species of  Pavlovales in the genera Pavlova and Diacronema. CCMP2436 is provisionally considered Arctic specific. 

Additional transcriptomes of the culture where CCMP2436 was grown under different culture conditions (urea as a nitrogen source, nitrate as a nitrogen source, low (18) and high salinity (36)) are available as part of the Marine Microbial Eukaryote Transcription Project.

Currently the culture is being taxonomically described and a complete description will be available on publication.

(written by C. Lovejoy, who initially isolated the culture and has maintained it in culture)