Organic compounds drive growth in phytoplankton taxa from different functional groups

Phytoplankton are usually considered autotrophs, but an increasing number of studies shows that many taxa are able to also utilise organic carbon. Acquiring nutrients and energy from different sources might enable an efficient uptake of required substances and provide a strategy to deal with a varying resource availability, especially in highly dynamic ecosystems such as estuaries. In our study we investigated the effects of 31 organic carbon sources on the growth (proxied by differences in cell counts after 24 h exposure) of 17 phytoplankton strains from the Elbe estuary spanning four functional groups. All of our strains were able to make use of at least 1 and up to 26 organic compounds for growth. Pico-sized green algae such as Mychonastes, as well as the nano-sized green alga Monoraphidium in particular were positively affected by a high variety of substances. Reduced light availability, typically appearing in turbid estuaries and similar habitats, resulted in an overall poorer abil..., , , # Organic compounds drive growth in phytoplankton taxa from different functional groups

Raw data, R scripts and supplementary material

## Description of the data and file structure

*This data contains:*
-Raw data of cell counts (ecoplates) and the associated R script to e.g. apply the t-test, plotting etc.#

-Sequencing data (1 fasta document, 15 sequence PDFs named by strain ID)

-Supplementary figures (S1-S3)

-Supplementary tables (S1 - S4)

Sequencing data refers to the identification of the strains as indicated in the supplementary data table S1. The fasta data contains the strain ID in the header of each sequence which connects it with table S1. The fasta data can be used with the ncbi database to identify sequences (ncbi blast). Results of this process and further information included (e.g. morphology) are shown in the supplementary data (tab. S1). The PDFs are provided by the sequencing company and imply the quality of each base identified by the colour code. Again, the nam...