Microbial communities are responsible for the bulk of biogeochemical processing in temporary headwater streams, yet there is still relatively little known about how community structure and function respond to periodic drying. Moreover, the ability to sample temporary habitats can be a logistical challenge due to the limited capability to measure and predict the timing, intensity and frequency o...

Steger, K. 2006. Composition of Microbial Communities in Composts A Tool to Assess Process Development and Quality of the Final Product. Doctoral dissertation. ISSN 1652-6880, ISBN 91-576-7080-3 The potential of microbial community fingerprinting methods to provide information about compost maturity in composting facilities was investigated. Studies in a pilot-scale reactor equipped with indepe...

Biological proliferation is optimized at various levels of organization, including the molecule (e.g. nucleic acids, prions), the cell (e.g. prokaryotic cells, eukaryotic cells), and the community (e.g. microbial biofilms, bioaggregates). Although it was initially assumed that this occurred through the genesis of information within DNA alone, it now appears that innovative design originates at ...

Cultivation-independent genomic approaches have greatly advanced our understanding of the ecology and diversity of microbial communities involved in biodegradation processes. However, much still needs to be resolved in terms of the structure, composition and dynamics of the microbial community in impacted ecosystems. Here we report on the RNA activity of the microbial community during the biore...

The extent to which the distribution of soil bacteria is controlled by local environment vs. spatial factors (e.g. dispersal, colonization limitation, evolutionary events) is poorly understood and widely debated. Our understanding of biogeographic controls in microbial communities is likely hampered by the enormous environmental variability encountered across spatial scales and the broad divers...

Around the world, raw materials are converted into fermented food products through microbial and enzymatic activity. Products are typically produced using a process known as batch culture, where small volumes of an old culture are used to initiate a fresh culture. Repeated over many years, and provided samples are not shared among producers, batch culture techniques allow for the natural evolut...

Rising global temperatures may increase the rates of soil organic matter decomposition by heterotrophic microorganisms, potentially accelerating climate change further by releasing additional carbon dioxide (CO2) to the atmosphere. However, the possibility that microbial community responses to prolonged warming may modify the temperature sensitivity of soil respiration creates large uncertainty...

The microbial community structure in various microaggregates in a loamy sand soil was investigated. The microaggregates were separated into outer and inner aggregates using a series of soil washes. Further physical fractionation of inner aggregates was achieved by separation into coarse and fine sand as macroaggregate fractions, coarse and fine silt as microaggregate fractions, and clay. Resear...

Water availability is known to influence many aspects of microbial growth and physiology, but less is known about how complex soil microbial communities respond to changing water status. To understand how long-term enhancement of soil water availability (without flooding) influences microbial communities, we measured the seasonal dynamics of several community-level traits following >7 years of ...

Chronic periodontitis is one of the most common forms of biofilm-induced diseases. Most of the recent studies were focus on the dental plaque microbial diversity and microbiomes. However, analyzing bacterial diversity at the taxonomic level alone limits deeper comprehension of the ecological relevance of the community. In this study, we compared the metabolic functional diversity of the microbi...