Considerable reshuffling of biotas has occurred in recent decades, largely through the gradual replacement of once spatially distinct, native communities with locally expanding and cosmopolitan, non-native ones, in a process coined biotic homogenization (McKinney & Lockwood 1999; Rahel 2000; Olden & Poff 2003; Rooney et al. 2004). Implications of biotic homogenization surfaced recently within t...

There is no consensus on when biotic interactions impact the range limits of species. Starting from MacArthur's use of invasibility to understand how biotic interactions influence coexistence, here we examine how biotic interactions shape species distributions. Range limits emerge from how birth, death, and movement rates vary with the environment. We clarify some basic issues revolving around ...

Plants have to cope with a plethora of biotic stresses such as herbivory and pathogen attacks throughout their life cycle. The biotic stresses typically trigger rapid emissions of volatile products of lipoxygenase (LOX) pathway (LOX products: various C6 aldehydes, alcohols, and derivatives, also called green leaf volatiles) associated with oxidative burst. Further a variety of defense pathways ...

Biotic resistance is the ability of communities to inhibit the establishment, spread or impact of novel species. However, the interactions that underlie biotic resistance depend heavily on the contexts in which species interact. Consequently, studies of biotic resistance that consider single processes, patches, species or life-history stages may provide an incomplete picture of the capacity for...

Biotic interchange after the connection of previously independently evolving floras and faunas is thought to be one of the key factors that shaped global biodiversity as we see it today. However, it was not known how biotic interchange develops over longer time periods of several million years following the secondary contact of different biotas. Here we present a novel method to investigate the...

To survive, plants must respond rapidly and effectively to various stress factors, including biotic and abiotic stresses. Salinity stress triggers the increase of cytosolic free Ca2+ concentration ([Ca2+]i) via Ca2+ influx across the plasma membrane, as well as bacterial flg22 and plant endogenous peptide Pep1. However, the interaction between abiotic stress-induced [Ca2+]i increases and biotic...

This special feature results from the symposium 'Ants 2016: ant interactions with their biotic environments' held in Munich in May 2016 and deals with the interactions between ants and other insects, plants, microbes and fungi, studied at micro- and macroevolutionary levels with a wide range of approaches, from field ecology to next-generation sequencing, chemical ecology and molecular genetics...

Tomato (Solanum lycopersicum) is one of the major vegetable plant and a model system for fruit development. Its global importance is due to its lycopene pigment which has anti-oxidative and anti-cancerous properties. Though > 1.5 M biotic stress associated ESTs of tomato are available but cumulative analysis to predict genes is warranted. Availability of whole genome de novo assembly can advant...

Lichens and mosses often share the same environmental conditions where they compete for substrate and other essential factors. Lichens use secondary metabolites as allelochemicals to repel surrounding plants and potential rivals. In mosses, endoreduplication leads to the occurrence of various ploidy levels in the same individual and has been suggested as an adaptation to abiotic stresses. Here,...