Composition of carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus in single cells of three filamentous cyanobacteria using nuclear microprobe and traditional techniques

Intracellular of carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus content in phytoplankton cells is traditionally measured using concentrates containing thousands to millions of cells. In the present study, we used a nuclear microprobe (NMP) to determine C, N and P concentrations in single filaments of 3 cyanobacteria species: Anabaena sp., Nodularia spumigena and Aphanizomenon flosaquae var. klebahnii isolated from Baltic Sea water. Estimations of C, N and P content per cell were calculated and compared to the concentrations found using traditional bulk methods. No significant differences regarding the C, N and P cellular content were found between the 2 methods for each of the species tested (p < 0.05). From our results, we conclude that the NMP can be a useful tool for studying the elemental content of single phytoplankton cells.