The manipulation of the rumen microbial ecosystem to improve animal productivity and lessen environmental impacts has been a research goal for many decades. Impediments to a targeted manipulation of the rumen have included a lack of knowledge of the diversity of the rumen microbial population as well as a lack of methods to thoroughly evaluate microbial changes. Molecular based studies of the r...

cadmium effects on soil microbial indices and on the interaction of arbuscular mycorrhiza fungi (amf) and as well on plant growth promoting rhizobacteria (pgpr) were investigated. the experiments were performed in the framework of a factorial design with levels of cadmium (0, 10, 30 and 100 mg kg-1 soil), and microbial inoculations (control, pgpr and amf) employing russian kanapweed as the expe...

Bacterial tolerance to antibiotics is a well-known phenomena; however, only recent studies of bacterial biofilms have shown how multifaceted tolerance really is. By joining into a structured community and offering shared protection and gene transfer, bacterial populations can protect themselves genotypically, phenotypically and physically. In this study, we collect a line of research that focus...

Understanding how population-level dynamics contribute to ecosystem-level processes is a primary focus of ecological research and has led to important breakthroughs in the ecology of macroscopic organisms. However, the inability to measure population-specific rates, such as growth, for microbial taxa within natural assemblages has limited ecologists’ understanding of how microbial populations i...

The effect of homologous recombination (HR) on the evolution of microbial genomes remains contentious as competing hypotheses seek to explain the evolutionary dynamics of microbial species. Evidence for HR between microbial genomes is widespread, and this process has been proposed to act as a cohesive force that can constrain the diversification of microbial lineages. We seek to characterize th...

Granular sludge is a novel alternative for the treatment of wastewater and offers numerous operational and economic advantages over conventional floccular-sludge systems. The majority of research on granular sludge has focused on optimization of engineering aspects relating to reactor operation with little emphasis on the fundamental microbiology. In this study, we hypothesize two novel mechani...

Microbes form complex and dynamic ecosystems that play key roles in the health of the animals and plants with which they are associated. The inter-species interactions are often represented by a directed, signed and weighted ecological network, where nodes represent microbial species and edges represent ecological interactions. Inferring the underlying ecological networks of microbial communiti...

Bacterial biofilms are organized communities composed of millions of microorganisms that accumulate on almost any kinds of surfaces. In this paper, a biofilm growth model on an agar substrate is developed based on mass conservation principles, Fick's first law, and Monod's kinetic reaction, by considering nutrient diffusion between biofilm and agar substrate. Our results show biofilm growth evo...

The study of soil microbial populations and diversity is an important way to understanding the soil energy process. In this study we analyzed the characteristics of soil microbial populations of the Tarim Desert Highway shelter-forest, by identifying microbial fatty acids and using methods of conventional cultivation. The results illustrated that the amount of soil microbial activity and the di...

BACKGROUND Predator-prey models for virus-host interactions predict that viruses will cause oscillations of microbial host densities due to an arms race between resistance and virulence. A new form of microbial resistance, CRISPRs (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats) are a rapidly evolving, sequence-specific immunity mechanism in which a short piece of invading viral DNA ...