Despite the importance of incubation assays for studies in microbial ecology that frequently require long confinement times, few reports are available in which changes in the assemblage structure of aquatic prokaryotes were monitored during long-term incubations. We measured rates of dissolved organic carbon degradation and microbial respiration by consumption of dissolved oxygen (DO) in four e...

Temporal variation in geochemistry can cause changes in microbial community structure and diversity. Here we studied temporal changes of microbial communities in Tengchong hot springs of Yunnan Province, China in response to geochemical variations by using microbial and geochemical data collected in January, June and August of 2011. Greater temporal variations were observed in individual taxa t...

A major goal of microbial ecology is to identify links between microbial community structure and microbial processes. Although this objective seems straightforward, there are conceptual and methodological challenges to designing studies that explicitly evaluate this link. Here, we analyzed literature documenting structure and process responses to manipulations to determine the frequency of stru...

Grasslands have a long history of invasion by exotic annuals, which may alter microbial communities and nutrient cycling through changes in litter quality and biomass turnover rates. We compared plant community composition, soil chemical and microbial community composition, potential soil respiration and nitrogen (N) turnover rates between invaded and restored plots in inland and coastal grassl...

the impact of phenolic-contaminated water on microbial community structure was assessed using biolog microarrays techniques. the following biolog plates were used: gen iii plates, new test panel for identification of both gram-negative and gram-positive bacteria, ecoplates microarray for evaluation of functional diversity of microbial communities and phenotype microarrays (pms) for characteriza...

Diversity is the main descriptor of community structure and is a determining factor in the dynamics and function of ecological communities [1]. However, the latter implicitly differs based on the different types of organisms and their relative abundance within the community which is considered to be significant [2]. Research in microbial ecology focuses on the study of microbial community dynam...

BACKGROUND Bronchiectasis is accompanied by chronic bronchial infection that may drive disease progression. However, the evidence base for antibiotic therapy is limited. DNA based methods offer better identification and quantification of microbial constituents of sputum than standard clinical culture and may help inform patient management strategies. Our study objective was to determine the lon...

Soil microbes play an essential role in the forest ecosystem as an active component. This study examined the hypothesis that soil microbial community structure and metabolic activity would vary with the increasing stand ages in long-term pure plantations of Pinus elliottii. The phospholipid fatty acids (PLFA) combined with community level physiological profiles (CLPP) method was used to assess ...

The microbial contribution to ecological resilience is still largely overlooked in coral reef ecology. Coral-associated bacteria serve a wide variety of functional roles with reference to the coral host, and thus, the composition of the overall microbiome community can strongly influence coral health and survival. Here, we synthesize the findings of recent studies (n = 45) that evaluated the im...

The microbial world has been shown to hold an unimaginable diversity. The use of rRNA genes and PCR amplification to assess microbial community structure and diversity present biases that need to be analyzed in order to understand the risks involved in those estimates. Herein, we show that PCR amplification of specific sequence targets within a community depends on the fractions that those sequ...