Highest plasticity of carbon‐concentrating mechanisms in earliest evolved phytoplankton

Abstract

Abstract Phytoplankton photosynthesis strongly relies on the operation of carbon‐concentrating mechanisms (CCMs) to accumulate CO 2 around their carboxylating enzyme ribulose‐1,5‐bisphosphate carboxylase/oxygenase (RuBisCO). Earlier evolved phytoplankton groups were shown to exhibit higher CCM activities to compensate for their RuBisCO with low CO 2 specificities. Here, we tested whether earlier evolved phytoplankton groups also exhibit a higher CCM plasticity. To this end, we collected data from literature and applied a Bayesian linear meta‐analytic model. Our results show that with elevated p CO 2 , photosynthetic CO 2 affinities decreased strongest and most consistent for the earlier evolved groups, i.e., cyanobacteria and dinoflagellates, while CO 2 ‐dependent changes in affinities for haptophytes and diatoms were smaller and less consistent. In addition, responses of maximum photosynthetic rates toward elevated p CO 2 were generally small and inconsistent across species. Our results demonstrate that phytoplankton groups with an earlier origin possess a high CCM plasticity, whereas more recently evolved groups do not, which likely results from evolved differences in the CO 2 specificity of RuBisCO.