Synergic effects of temperature and irradiance on the physiology of the marine Synechococcus strain WH7803

Understanding how microorganisms adjust their metabolism to maintain their ability to survive to short-term environmental variations constitutes one of the major current challenges in microbial ecology. Here WH7803, the best physiologically characterized marine Synechococcus strain was submitted to modulated light/dark cycles or acclimated to continuous high-light (HL) or low-light (LL), then shifted to various stress conditions, including low (LT) or high temperature (HT), HL and ultraviolet (UV) radiations. Physiological responses were analyzed by measuring time courses of photosystem II (PSII) quantum yield, PSII repair rate, pigment and lipid content as well as whole transcriptomes. This notably revealed that cells previously acclimated to HL seem to be better prepared than LL-acclimated cells to sustain an additional light or UV stress, but not a LT stress. Indeed, LT seems to induce a synergic effect with the HL treatment, as previously observed with oxidative stress. While all tested shift conditions induced the downregulation of many photosynthetic genes, notably those encoding PSI, cytochrome b6/f and phycobilisomes, UV stress proved to be more deleterious for PSII than the other treatments, and full recovery of damaged PSII from UV stress seemed to involve the neo-synthesis of a fairly large number of PSII subunits and not just the reassembly of pre-existing subunits after D1 replacement. In contrast, genes involved in glycogen degradation and carotenoid biosynthesis pathways were more particularly upregulated in response to LT. Altogether, these experiments allowed us to identify responses common to all stresses and those more specific to a given stress, thus highlighting genes potentially involved in niche acclimation of this key component of marine ecosystems. Our data also highlighted important specificities of the stress responses compared to model freshwater cyanobacteria.