The microbial way of life spans at least 3.8 billion years of evolution. Microbial organisms are pervasive, ubiquitous, and essential components of all ecosystems. The geochemical composition of Earth's biosphere has been molded largely by microbial activities. Yet, despite the predominance of microbes during the course of life's history, general principles and theory of microbial evolution and...

The rapid development of synthetic biology enables the design, construction and optimization of synthetic microbial consortia to achieve specific functions. In China, the "973" project-"Design and Construction of Microbial Consortia" was funded by the National Basic Research Program of China in January 2014. It was proposed to address the fundamental challenges in engineering natural microbial ...

Positive results from using microbes in restoration and agricultural research coupled with changing technology have led to increased interest scaling up commercializing microbial inoculants as biostimulants bioprotectants. Ecological has not kept pace microbiome regards the effect that these introduced on resident plant soil communities, resulting ecosystem services. Are we unleashing, or alrea...

Characterization of the various microbial populations present in exoelectrogenic biofilms provides insight into the processes required to convert complex organic matter in wastewater streams into electrical current in bioelectrochemical systems (BESs). Analysis of the community profiles of exoelectrogenic microbial consortia in BESs fed different substrates gives a clearer picture of the differ...

the objective of this study was to explore the microbial community diversities and the relationships between microbial community compositions and hydrochemical factors in nitrate contaminated groundwater of hun river alluvial plain. the method of polymerase chain reaction (pcr)-denaturing, gradient gel electrophoresis (dgge) gene fingerprints combined with canonical correspondence analysis（cca）...

All biologists who sample natural communities are plagued with the problem of how well a sample reflects a community’s “true” diversity. New genetic techniques have revealed extensive microbial diversity that was previously undetected with culture-dependent methods and morphological identification (reviewed in references 2 and 46), but exhaustive inventories of microbial communities still remai...

Genomics and proteomics of microorganisms are revolutionizing our understanding of marine microbial ecology. In this essay we address this by discussing (1) what microbial genome resources are available for marine ecologists, (2) how single-organism genomics and proteomics have revealed new microbial functions in the marine ecosystem, and (3) how the integration of metagenomics, metaproteomics ...

A new strategy of electrogen immobilization was developed to construct a conductive artificial biofilm (CAB) on an anode of a microbial fuel cell (MFC). The MFCs equipped with an optimized CAB exhibited an eleven fold increase in power output compared with natural biofilms.