Intra-specific variation in metal tolerance modulate competition between two marine diatoms

This project contains data for the manuscript Intra-specific variation in metal tolerance modulate competition between two marine diatoms . The experiments tests how different toxic concentrations of heavy metals modulates competition between an artificially assembled community of Baltic Sea diatoms (four clonal strains each of the two diatom species Skeletonema marinoi (SM) and Thalassiosira baltica (TB). Briefly we use toxic Dose Response curves (DRC) to model how inter and intra specific selection between strains is expected to be modulated under Cadmium, Copper and Silver stress. The stress level was set at the average 50% inhibition concentration (EC50) between all eight strains. Strains were mixed at even biomass based on Relative Chl a Fluorescence Units (RFU) and cultivated semi-continuously to maintain exponential growth. The growth of individual species was measured through microscopy observations and the photosynthetic capacity was monitored using Pulse Amplitude Modulation (PAM) fluorometry. A experimental design flow figure is included as a supplement. The complete functional set of scripts, statistical analysis, and graphical illustrations in R can be found on github: https://github.com/Bearstar85/Selection_Competition_2021