Evaluation of these molecular tools represents an essential Ku-0059436 cost first step toward large-scale assessment, using next generation sequencing amongst other methods, of the biodiversity, biogeography, and eco-evolutionary dynamics of these key phytoplankton taxa. Clonal culture strains (Table S1 in the Supporting Information) from the Roscoff Culture Collection, the Plymouth culture collection, and the Provasoli-Guillard

Center for Culture of Marine Phytoplankton were maintained in K/2(-Si,-Tris,-Cu) medium (Keller et al. 1987) at 17°C with 50 μmol photons · m−2 · s−1 illumination provided by daylight neon tubes with a 14:10 h L:D cycle. For analysis of coccolith morphology by SEM, calcified cells were harvested at early exponential growth phase and filtered onto 0.22 μm nucleopore filters (Millipore, Molsheim, France), then dried for 2 h at 55°C. Small pieces of filters were gold/palladium sputter coating and observed with a FEI Quanta SEM (FEI, Hillsboro, OR, USA). Genomic DNA was extracted from cultures harvested in the exponential phase of growth using the DNeasy Plant mini kit (Qiagen, Hilden, Germany). Partial 18S, 28S, 16S, rbcL, tufA (two fragments, one short and one long), petA, cox1 (two fragments, one

short, and one long), cox2, cox3, rpl16, and dam genes were amplified by PCR Seliciclib using the primer sets listed in Table S2 in the Supporting Information (primer maps are illustrated in Fig. S2 in the Supporting Information). PCRs were performed in a total reaction volume of 25 μL using the Phusion Polymerase kit (Finnzymes, Espoo, Finland).

A standard PCR protocol was used for all genes with a T1 thermal cycler (Biometra, Göttingen, Germany): 2 min initial denaturation at 98°C, followed by 35 cycles of 10 s at 98°C, 30 s annealing at 55°C, 30 s extension at 72°C. A final 10 min extension step at 72°C was conducted to complete the amplification. Amplification products were controlled by electrophoresis on a 1% agarose gel. The PCR products were sequenced directly on an ABI PRISM 3100 xl DNA auto sequencer (Perkin-Elmer, Foster City, CA, USA) using the ABI PRISM BigDye Terminator Loperamide Cycle Sequencing Kit (Perkin-Elmer). The sequences determined in this study were deposited in GenBank (Table S3 in the Supporting Information). The nucleotide sequence data sets of each gene were aligned using the online version of the multiple alignment program MAFFT (Katoh et al. 2007). Alignments were double-checked de visu in the sequence editor BIOEDIT (Hall 1999) and coding regions were determined for plastidial (Sanchez-Puerta et al. 2005) and mitochondrial (Sánchez Puerta et al. 2004) markers.