Groups without Cultured Representatives Dominate Eukaryotic Picophytoplankton in the Oligotrophic South East Pacific Ocean

Abstract

Our data demonstrate that a very large fraction of the eukaryotic picophytoplankton still escapes cultivation. The use of flow cytometry sorting should prove very useful to better characterize specific plankton populations by molecular approaches such as gene cloning or metagenomics, and also to obtain into culture strains representative of these novel groups.