Abstract
The sugar kelp Saccharina latissima is cultivated in Europe for food, feed and ultimately the production of chemical commodities and bioenergy. Being cultivated in the open sea, S. latissima is exposed to potentially harmful organisms, such as Laminarionema elsbetiae, a filamentous brown algal endophyte with a very high prevalence in wild populations of European S. latissima. As it was shown previously that S. latissima sporophytes get infected by L. elsbetiae very early in their life, seeding the spores on collectors and keeping them under controlled conditions during the critical time of a possible infection with filamentous endophytes could be advantageous over direct seeding techniques, where the ropes are deployed within days after seeding. We used a qPCR-assay to assess the prevalence of the endophyte L. elsbetiae in S. latissima cultivated during winter in Northern Brittany, comparing individuals from direct-seeded ropes and collector-seeded lines that were kept in laboratory conditions for different time spans. No DNA of the endophyte was detected in the samples, suggesting that either the kelps were not infected or the amount of endophytic filaments were below the detection rate of the qPCR assay. Furthermore, L. elsbetiae could not be detected in the seawater surrounding the kelp farm, indicating that L. elsbetiae is not fertile or disperses at a very small scale in Northern Brittany during the deployment time of young kelps. Our results suggest that infections of cultivated S. latissima with the endophyte L. elsbetiae might be a minor problem in kelp farms in Northern Brittany if the seeding production is kept under controlled conditions without external contamination.
Highlights
The sugar kelp Saccharina latissima is the closest European relative to the Asian S. japonica that contributes to one third of the global production of seaweed (Chung et al, 2017)
Our results suggest that infections of cultivated S. latissima with the endophyte L. elsbetiae might be a minor problem in kelp farms in Northern Brittany if the seeding production is kept under controlled conditions without external contamination
Cq values were obtained only with the CG primer pair, but not using the Laminarionema specific primer pair (Table 1), indicating that DNA of the kelp could be detected in the extracted samples, but not DNA of the endophyte
Summary
The sugar kelp Saccharina latissima is the closest European relative to the Asian S. japonica that contributes to one third of the global production of seaweed (Chung et al, 2017). Endophytic algae invade stipes and fronds of kelps and their presence often coincides with severe disease signs, such as galls (Apt, 1988; Thomas et al, 2009), dark spots (Ellertsdóttir and Peters, 1997) or twisted stipes and blades (Peters and Schaffelke, 1996). They have been reported to lower the commercial value of infected kelps (Yoshida and Akiyama, 1979). Amongst them is Laminarionema elsbetiae, a filamentous brown algal endophyte that infects up to 100% of
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