Two of the largest crude oil-polluted areas in the world are the semi-enclosed Mediterranean and Red Seas, but the effect of chronic pollution remains incompletely understood on a large scale. We compared the influence of environmental and geographical constraints and anthropogenic forces (hydrocarbon input) on bacterial communities in eight geographically separated oil-polluted sites along the...

The aim of our study was to investigate the intrinsic diversity of genus based on chemical composition of natural extracts of Cacalia, Dracocephalum, Jatropha, Saussurea and Senecio. Four rarefaction approaches (richness, Shannon’s entropy, Simpson’s diversity, and max-entropy) were implemented as an algorithm and run 10,000 times. Our results showed similar patterns of richness in natural comp...

Natural products are a major source of biological molecules. The 3-methylfuran scaffold is found in a variety of plant secondary metabolite chemical elicitors that confer host-plant resistance against insect pests. Herein, the diversity-oriented synthesis of a natural-product-like library is reported, in which the 3-methylfuran core is fused in an angular attachment to six common natural produc...

Insects use a spectacular variety of chemical signals to guide their social behaviours. How such chemical diversity arises is a long-standing problem in evolutionary biology. Here we describe the contribution of the fatty acid elongase Bond to both pheromone diversity and male fertility in Drosophila. Genetic manipulation and mass spectrometry analysis reveal that the loss of bond eliminates th...

Due to the important role of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) in ecosystem functioning, determination of the effect of management practices on the AMF diversity in agricultural soils is essential for the sustainability of these agro-ecosystems. The objective of this study was to compare the AMF diversity in Prunus persica roots under two types of fertilisation (inorganic, with or without manu...

Structural GenomiX, Inc. (SGX) has combined high-throughput X-ray crystallography with a fragment-based approach to lead identification/lead optimization. FAST™ (Fragments of Active Structures) exploits crystallographic screening to detect, visualize, and identify small lead-like ligands (molecular weight 150-200, typical hit rates 1-5%) that bind productively to the target protein. Each member...

Oxygen is thought to promote species and biomolecule diversity. Previous studies have suggested that oxygen expands metabolic networks by acquiring metabolites with different chemical properties (higher hydrophobicity, for example). However, such conclusions are typically based on biased evaluation, and are therefore non-conclusive. Thus, we re-investigated the effect of oxygen on metabolic evo...

DNA and RNA contain, next to the four canonical nucleobases, a number of modified nucleosides that extend their chemical information content. RNA is particularly rich in modifications, which is obviously an adaptation to their highly complex and variable functions. In fact, the modified nucleosides and their chemical structures establish a second layer of information which is of central importa...

The response of plant species composition, diversity and soil nutrient availability to different canopysizes and age gaps in a Pinus Massoniana plantation were surveyed in Taizishan, Hubei province, central China. The soil chemical properties of 27 gaps and 3 non-gaps were measured and compared. The study objectives were: (a) confirm whether and when nutrient pulses emerged in small gaps; (b) d...

The synthesis of diverse three-dimensional libraries has become of paramount importance for obtaining better leads for drug discovery. Such libraries are predicted to fare better than traditional compound collections in phenotypic screens and against difficult targets. Herein we report the diversity-oriented synthesis of a compound library using rhodium carbenoid chemistry to access structurall...