A molecular and phenotypic analysis of Nodularia (cyanobacteria) from the Baltic Sea

The filamentous diazotrophic cyanobacterium Nodularia forms water blooms each year in the Baltic Sea. Filaments isolated from such water blooms vary in their trichome width, degree of coiling, and properties of their gas vesicles; previously, these characters have been used to classify individuals to species level. To test the validity of such a phenotypic classification, we determined the nucleotide sequences for a region of the phycocyanin locus that includes a noncoding intergenic spacer (PC-IGS), the IGS between two adjacent copies of the gvpA gene (which encodes the main structural gas vesicle protein) and the rDNA internal transcribed spacer (rDNA-ITS), for 13 clonal Nodularia isolates from the Baltic Sea during August 1994. The complete 16S-rDNA sequence was determined for three isolates and was found to be identical in each of them, Molecular sequences for noncoding regions of the genome were used to assign isolates to three groups on the basis of PC-IGS, two groups on the basis of gvpA-IGS, and three groups on the basis of rDNA-ITS. No consistent correlation was found between genotype and any of the phenotypic features examined, and no link was found between any of these features themselves, indicating that these characters are not useful for placing Nodularia isolates into meaningful taxonomic groups. The PC-IGS, gvpA-IGS, and rDNA-ITS genotypic groupings were not congruent. This might indicate that gene flow occurs between individuals in Nodularia populations.