Narragansett Bay (Estuary) Raw sequence reads. marine metagenome

Nutrient availability plays a central role in driving the activities and large-scale distributions of phytoplankton, yet there are still fundamental gaps in understanding how phytoplankton metabolize nutrients, like nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P), and how this metabolic potential is modulated in field populations. Here we show that co-occurring diatoms in Narragansett Bay have apparent differences in their metabolic capacity for N and P. Further, bioinformatic approaches enabled the identification and species-specific comparison of resource-responsive genes. Variation of these resource-responsive gene sets highlights the disparate transcriptional responses these species have to the same environment, which likely reflects the role resource partitioning has in facilitating the vast diversity of the phytoplankton.