Nanoscale phycology

Abstract

In 1980, the Sixth Symposium on Recent and Fossil Diatoms was held in Budapest, Hungary. It was the first opportunity many of us had to meet our colleagues from behind the “Iron Curtain” and an early harbinger of the perestroika of politics and science that took place a decade later and is now being reversed. There were many worthy contributions, and as was usual at the time, the Proceedings were published in a special volume edited by Ross (1981). One of the presentations that was not included in the volume was one by the late Beatrice Booth of the Department of Oceanography, University of Washington, who showed a series of slides of curious tiny cells, covered by elaborate silica plates that abutted to form a continuous wall, rather than overlapping as in scaly synurophytes. The slide projection during this symposium was tricky (the Hungarian projector didn't like some of our transparencies), but participants, including micropaleontologists and widely experienced botanists (e.g., Hans Adolf von Stosch), were introduced to these “new” organisms, and Beatrice asked whether we had seen anything like them previously or had any idea what they might be. None of us had. A paper was published the same year (Booth et al., 1980), reporting and illustrating the cells from nanoplankton in the Gulf of Alaska. It was suggested that they were “likely a cyst stage and that they may be part of the life cycle of species of siliceous oceanic choanoflagellates.” Of course, at that time, there was no realistic possibility of using DNA or protein sequence data to check their true affinities, and “opisthokonts” and “stramenopiles” were concepts of the far future.