Most techniques used to assay the growth of microbes in natural communities provide no information on the relationship between microbial productivity and community structure. To identify actively growing bacteria, we adapted a technique from immunocytochemistry to detect and selectively isolate DNA from bacteria incorporating bromodeoxyuridine (BrdU), a thymidine analog. In addition, we develop...

Land use intensification is associated with loss of biodiversity and altered ecosystem functioning. Until now most studies on the relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem functioning focused on random loss of species, while loss of rare species that usually are the first to disappear received less attention. Here we test if the effect of rare microbial species loss on plant productivity ...

Considering the extensive functional redundancy in microbial communities and great difficulty in elucidating it based on taxonomic structure, studies on the biogeography of soil microbial activity at large spatial scale are as important as microbial community structure. Eighty-four soil samples were collected across a region from south to north China (about 1,000 km) to address the questions if...

This study was initiated to explore the effects of ozone (O3) exposure on potted wheat roots and soil microbial community function. Three treatments were performed: (1) Air with daily averaged O3 concentration of 4–10 ppb (control situation, CK), (2) Air plus 8 h averaged O3 concentration of 76.1 ppb (O3-1), and (3) Air plus 8 h averaged O3 concentration of 118.8 ppb (O3-2). In treatments with ...

Agricultural practices have proven to be unsuitable in many cases, causing considerable reductions in soil quality. Land management practices can provide solutions to this problem and contribute to get a sustainable agriculture model. The main objective of this work was to assess the effect of different agricultural management practices on soil microbial community structure (evaluated as abunda...

Microorganisms rarely live isolated in their natural environments but rather function in consolidated and socializing communities. Despite the growing availability of high-throughput sequencing and metagenomic data, we still know very little about the metabolic contributions of individual microbial players within an ecological niche and the extent and directionality of interactions among them. ...

Staphylococcus aureus is a major cause of nosocomial and community-acquired infections and represents a significant burden on the healthcare system. S. aureus attachment to medical implants and host tissue, and the establishment of a mature biofilm, play an important role in the persistence of chronic infections. The formation of a biofilm, and encasement of cells in a polymer-based matrix, dec...

Diversity is often associated with the functional stability of ecological communities from microbes to macroorganisms. Understanding how diversity responds to environmental perturbations and the consequences of this relationship for ecosystem function are thus central challenges in microbial ecology. Unimodal diversity-disturbance relationships, in which maximum diversity occurs at intermediate...

Drought duration and intensity are expected to increase with global climate change. How changes in water availability and temperature affect the combined plant-soil-microorganism response remains uncertain. We excavated soil monoliths from a beech (Fagus sylvatica L.) forest, thus keeping the understory plant-microbe communities intact, imposed an extreme climate event, consisting of drought an...

The development of bioinformatic solutions for microbial ecology in Perl is limited by the lack of modules to represent and manipulate microbial community profiles from amplicon and meta-omics studies. Here we introduce Bio-Community, an open-source, collaborative toolkit that extends BioPerl. Bio-Community interfaces with commonly used programs using various file formats, including BIOM, and p...