Despite the large number of reports describing sponge-microbe associations, limited knowledge is available about associated fungi and their relationships with the hosts. In this work, specific fungal strains were obtained directly from in vitro sponge cell cultures (primmorphs) and single sponge cells (cytospins) and compared with those obtained from whole tissue preparations. A total of 27 fun...

Sponges are abundant, diverse and functionally important organisms of coral reef ecosystems. Sponge-associated microorganisms have been receiving greater attention because of their significant contribution to sponge biomass, biogeochemical cycles and biotechnological potentials. However, our understanding of the sponge microbiome is limited to a few species of sponges from restricted geographic...

Title of Dissertation: ROLES OF THE SYMBIOTIC MICROBIAL COMMUNITIES ASSOCIATED WITH SPONGE HOSTS IN THE NITROGEN AND PHOSPHORUS CYCLES Fan Zhang, Doctor of Philosophy, 2015 Directed By: Dr. Russell T. Hill, Professor, Institute of Marine and Environmental Technology, University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science Marine sponges are habitat-forming organisms in coral reefs. Many sponge ...

OBJECTIVE To compare selected effects of tub bathing versus traditional sponge bathing in healthy, term newborns and their mothers' ratings of pleasure and confidence with the bath. DESIGN Randomized controlled study. SETTING The maternity unit of an eastern Canadian hospital. PARTICIPANTS One hundred two mother-baby pairs were randomly assigned to an experimental tub bath or a sponge bat...

Sponges show the highest diversity of associated bacteria among marine invertebrates. Immunological evidence traces the origin of the sponge bacterial symbioses to the Precambrian era. Hence, sponges appear to be ideally suited for studying the evolutionary origins of prokaryote-metazoan associations. Sponges produce either calcareous or siliceous skeletons, which only coexist in a relict group...

Marine reserves are becoming progressively more important as anthropogenic impacts continue to increase, but we have little baseline information for most marine environments. In this study, we focus on the Oceanic Shoals Commonwealth Marine Reserve (CMR) in northern Australia, particularly the carbonate banks and terraces of the Sahul Shelf and Van Diemen Rise which have been designated a Key E...

In this paper, we study the Menger property on a class of hypercube-like networks. We show that in all n-dimensional hypercubelike networks with n − 2 vertices removed, every pair of unremoved vertices u and v are connected by min{deg(u),deg(v)} vertex-disjoint paths, where deg(u) and deg(v) are the remaining degree of vertices u and v, respectively. Furthermore, under the restricted condition ...

We study subgroups of Z which possess group theoretic properties analogous to properties introduced by Menger (1924), Hurewicz (1925), Rothberger (1938), and Scheepers (1996). The studied properties were introduced independently by Kočinac and Okunev. We obtain purely combinatorial characterizations of these properties, and combine them with other techniques to solve several questions of Babink...

This is a paper based on author’s lectures delivered at the 2005 Clay Mathematics Institute summer school at MSRI. It serves as an overview on the Kähler-Ricci flow over complete noncompact manifolds.