Abstract

High-Performance Liquid Chromatography (HPLC) is a widely used method for measuring the concentration of chlorophyll a as an indicator for estimating phytoplankton biomass and primary production and also for identifying carotenoids to determine phytoplankton composition. However, tissue grinding procedure requires a lot of time and experience in the analysis of multiple sample. Accordingly, we measured the concentrations of photosynthetic pigments before and after the grinding, in order to understand the grinding effects on the quantitative analysis of chlorophylls and carotenoids using samples from southwestern East Sea. When tissue grinding procedure was omitted, we found that Chl a concentrations were underestimated up to 45% in average. Also, concentrations of Zeaxanthin, 19`-butanoyloxyfucoxanthin, 19`-hexanoyloxyfucoxanthin, biomarkers of pico and nano-size phytoplankton, were underestimated up to maximum 77~85% without grinding. We found that the smaller the phytoplankton, the bigger underestimation of their biomarker pigments concentration is likely to happen due to the incomplete extraction. Thus, tissue grinding procedure should be included for HPLC analysis in all cases, to prevent the underestimation of not only Chl a but also carotenoids pigments.

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