NTR: marine mucilage - and other subtypes of marine snow

[cmungall]

(low priority, this is a concept I encountered recently that seems like it may be of importance, but I have no concrete use cases as this time).

'marine muchilage' appears to be a particular form of ENVO:01000158 ! marine snow

There is a poorly sourced and confusing wikipedia article here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_snot (see also the Talk page)

The article may be conflating the products of different phenomena, including side-effects of oil spills and the secretions of phytoplankton.

Better sources may be:

• http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0007006 -- Climate Change and the Potential Spreading of Marine Mucilage and Microbial Pathogens in the Mediterranean Sea
• http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048969705006200 -- Mucilaginous aggregates in the northern Adriatic in the period 1999–2002: Typology and distribution
• http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304420308001084 -- The complex mechanisms of marine mucilage formation by spectroscopic investigation of the structural characteristics of natural and synthetic mucilage samples

The wikipedia page on marine snow has a lot of interesting material regarding the production of different kinds of marine snow, but it seems to be poorly sourced and the quality is not clear. However, it suggests that it may be wise to focus first on the relevant processes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_snow

[pbuttigieg]

Creating... Does GO have classes like exudation of carbohydrates (draft class created as ENVO_1000747)? It would be cool if we could represent things like

phytoplankton exudation of photosyntetically-derived carbohydrates produced under stressful conditions Danavaro et al. 2009

[pbuttigieg]

Created as ENVO_1000746

[pbuttigieg]

Reading the articles suggests that we'll need support from GO process to represent this well. I'm willing to help out here as this will be of great use to us in the marine microbial ecology domain.

[cmungall]

GO:0046903 ! secretion [DEF: "The controlled release of a substance by a cell or a tissue."]

Before adding the relevant class to GO we'd ask a few questions: is this secretion something the phytoplankton have evolved to do by some specific mechanism? Or is this an abnormal behavior? What good does secreting the carbohydrates do for them?

On 2 Jan 2016, at 11:36, Pier Luigi Buttigieg wrote:

Creating... Does GO have classes like exudation of carbohydrates (draft class created as ENVO_1000747)? It would be cool if we could represent things like

phytoplankton exudation of photosyntetically-derived carbohydrates produced under stressful conditions Danavaro et al. 2009

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Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub: https://github.com/EnvironmentOntology/envo/issues/276#issuecomment-168422136

[pbuttigieg]

is this secretion something the phytoplankton have evolved to do by some specific mechanism?

In the marine realm, it's generally quite useful (helps form marine snow aggregates, protection from harmful substances which get trapped in the exopolymeric matrix, and many other functions). It can also be "abnormal" behaviour in some cases, but mostly it's quite adaptive.

It does occur in stress situations for some organisms like diatoms, but that's not necessarily abnormal.