Photosynthesis evolved in the ocean more than 2 billion years ago and is now performed by a wide range of evolutionarily distinct organisms, including both prokaryotes and eukaryotes. Our appreciation of their abundance, distributions, and contributions to primary production in the ocean has been increasing since they were first discovered in the seventeenth century and has now been enhanced by data emerging from the Tara Oceans project, which performed a comprehensive worldwide sampling of plankton in the upper layers of the ocean between 2009 and 2013. Largely using recent data from Tara Oceans, here we review the geographic distributions of phytoplankton in the global ocean and their diversity, abundance, and standing stock biomass. We also discuss how omics-based information can be incorporated into studies of photosynthesis in the ocean and show the likely importance of mixotrophs and photosymbionts.

中文翻译：

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塔拉海洋中的浮游植物。

光合作用在海洋中进化超过20亿年前，现在由多种进化上不同的生物体（包括原核生物和真核生物）进行。自从它们在17世纪首次被发现以来，我们对它们的丰富性，分布及其对海洋初级生产的贡献的赞赏一直在增加，现在，塔拉海洋项目（Tara Oceans project）提供的数据已对这些浮游生物进行了全面的全球采样在2009年至2013年之间，位于海洋的上层。我们主要使用塔拉海洋的最新数据，在这里回顾全球海洋中浮游植物的地理分布及其多样性，丰度和立足生物量。