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Background and aims – The present study aims to describe a new species of pennate blue diatom from the genus Haslea, H. nusantara sp. nov., collected from Semak Daun Island, the Seribu Archipelago, in Indonesian marine waters. Methods – Assessment for species identification was conducted using light microscopy, Scanning Electron Microscopy and molecular techniques. The morphological characteristics of H. nusantara have been described, illustrated and compared to other morphologically similar blue Haslea taxa, distributed worldwide. Additionally, molecular characterization was achieved by sequencing plastidial and mitochondrial genomes. Key results – This new species, named Haslea nusantara, cannot be discriminated by its morphology (stria density) but it is characterized by its gene sequences (rbcL chloroplast gene and cox1 mitochondrial gene). Moreover, it differentiates from other blue Haslea species by the presence of a thin central bar, which has been previously reported in non-blue species like H. pseudostrearia. The complete mitochondrion (36,288 basepairs, bp) and plastid (120,448 bp) genomes of H. nusantara were sequenced and the gene arrangements were compared with other diatom genomes. Phylogeny analyses established using rbcL indicated that H. nusantara is included in the blue Haslea cluster and close to a blue Haslea sp. found in Canary Islands (H. silbo sp. ined.). Conclusions – All investigations carried out in this study show that H. nusantara is a new blue-pigmented species, which belongs to the blue Haslea clade, with an exceptional geographic distribution in the Southern Hemisphere.

In diatoms, the main photosynthetic pigments are chlorophylls a and c, fucoxanthin, diadinoxanthin and diatoxanthin. The marine pennate diatom Haslea ostrearia has long been known for producing, in addition to these generic pigments, a water-soluble blue pigment, marennine. This pigment, responsible for the greening of oysters in western France, presents different biological activities: allelopathic, antioxidant, antibacterial, antiviral, and growth-inhibiting. A method to extract and purify marennine has been developed, but its chemical structure could hitherto not be resolved. For decades, H. ostrearia was the only organism known to produce marennine, and can be found worldwide. Our knowledge about H. ostrearia-like diatom biodiversity has recently been extended with the discovery of several new species of blue diatoms, the recently described H. karadagensis, H. silbo sp. inedit. and H. provincialis sp. inedit. These blue diatoms produce different marennine-like pigments, which belong to the same chemical family and present similar biological activities. Aside from being a potential source of natural blue pigments, H. ostrearia-like diatoms thus present a commercial potential for aquaculture, cosmetics, food and health industries.

We present the first study examining mtDNA transmission in diatoms, using sexual progeny of the pennate species Haslea ostrearia (Naviculaceae). A fragment of the cytochrome oxidase subunit I gene (cox1) with 7 nucleic substitutions between parental clones was used as a parental tracer in 16 F1 clones obtained from two pairs of mating crosses. Each cross involved a parental clone isolated from France (Bay of Bourgneuf) and Sweden (Kattegat Bay). We determined that all progeny possessed only one cox1 parental haplotype. These results suggest that the mitochondrial DNA transmission in H. ostrearia is uniparental. Implications and new topics of investigation are discussed.

A new species of raphid pennate diatom producing a blue pigment, Haslea karadagensis Davidovich, Gastineau & Mouget, sp. nov., was recently isolated from the Crimean coast of the Black Sea (Ukraine). This organism is very similar to the well-known Haslea ostrearia, the first described ‘blue’ diatom, which produces marennine, the pigment involved in the greening of oysters. The Ukrainian diatom, H. karadagensis, differs slightly from H. ostrearia in the structure of its frustule, and the two organisms are unable to interbreed. Two molecular markers, rbcL and the ITS1–5.8S–ITS2 sequences, showed 2% and >50% differences, respectively, between the two species. UV-visible spectrophotometry and in vivo confocal micro-Raman spectroscopy were used to compare the pigment of H. karadagensis with marennine. Both pigments showed absorption bands in the UV and red regions, but the positions of the maxima differ between the pigments. Significant differences were observed by micro-Raman spectroscopy in the 1000–1700 cm−...

Haslea provincialis Gastineau, Hansen & Mouget, sp. nov., is a new, morphologically semicryptic blue diatom discovered on the French shores of the Mediterranean Sea. Like H. ostrearia and H. karadagensis, H. provincialis shares the capacity to synthesize a marennine-like blue pigment. Sexual reproduction between clones of H. provincialis has been repeatedly observed and resulted in viable initial cells. There were no sexual interactions with sexually competent clones of H. ostrearia or H. karadagensis, as would be expected for a separate biological species. There are strong similarities between the H. provincialis pigment and the marennine produced by H. ostrearia, evidenced by UV-visible spectrophotometry and Raman spectrometry. However, unlike the marennine from H. ostrearia, no differences were found between the extracellular and the intracellular forms of the pigment in H. provincialis. This indicates that the synthesis pathways and excretion mechanisms among the three ‘blue’ Haslea may be spe...

Diatoms are usually referred to as golden-brown microalgae, due to the colour of their plastids and to their pigment composition, mainly carotenoids (fucoxanthin, diadinoxanthin, diatoxanthin), which mask chlorophylls a and c. The species Haslea ostrearia Gaillon/Bory (Simonsen) appears unique because of its extraplastidial bluish colour, a consequence of the presence of a water-soluble blue pigment at cell apices, marennine. When released in seawater, marennine can be fixed on gills of oysters and other bivalves, which turn green. This greening phenomenon is economically exploited in Southwestern France, as it gives an added value to oysters. For decades, this singularity ascribed a worldwide distribution to H. ostrearia, first as Vibrio ostrearius, then Navicula ostrearia, last as H. ostrearia, when the genus Haslea was proposed by R. Simonsen (1974). Indeed, this ‘birthmark’ (presence of blue apices) made H. ostrearia easily recognisable without further scrutiny and identification of the microalga as well as its presence easily deduced from the greening of bivalves. Consequently, the widely admitted cosmopolitan character of H. ostrearia has only been questioned recently, following the discovery in 2008, of a new species of blue diatom in the Black Sea, Haslea karadagensis. The biodiversity of blue diatoms suddenly increased with the finding of other blue species in the Mediterranean Sea, the Canary Islands, etc., the taxonomic characterization of which is in progress. This review thus focuses on the unsuspected biodiversity of blue diatoms within the genus Haslea. Methods for species determination (morphometrics, chemotaxonomy, genomics), as well as a new species, are presented and discussed.

Haslea karadagensis is a recently-described diatom, the second species of blue diatom to be identified, after Haslea ostrearia, the type species of the genus Haslea, which produces marennine, the water soluble pigment involved in the greening of oysters. Haslea karadagensis also produces a blue grey pigment, with different spectral characteristics from marennine itself. This study demonstrates that the pigment from H. karadagensis can colour the gills of two oysters of economic importance, Crassostrea gigas and Ostrea edulis, when they are fed with a suspension of algae, in the same way as the marennine produced by H. ostrearia. Like marennine, the purified pigment produced by H. karadagensis displays several different biological activities. Both the intracellular and extracellular forms of the pigment have been shown to inhibit the growth of marine bacteria (Polaribacter irgensii, Vibrio aestuarianus, Pseudoalteromonas elyakowii) and fungi (Corollospora maritima, Lulworthia sp., and Dendryphiella salina). The pigment also displays antiviral activity against Herpes simplex virus type 1 (HSV-1). In light of these preliminary results, the use of H. karadagensis and putative applications of its pigment in aquaculture, food chemistry and ecophysiological research, are discussed.