The functional response to and recovery from coal-coking waste effluent was evaluated for sediment microbial communities. Twenty estimates of microbial population density, biomass, and activity were measured five times during a 15-month period. Significant effects on microbial communities were observed in response to both wastewater contamination and diversion of the wastewater. Multivariate an...

Linking taxonomic identity and functional potential at the population-level is important for the study of mixed microbial communities and is greatly facilitated by the availability of microbial reference genomes. While the culture-independent recovery of population-level genomes from environmental samples using the binning of metagenomic data has expanded available reference genome catalogs, se...

Problem statement: The aim of this study was mainly focused on the evolution of microbial biomasses C and N during the composting of municipal solid wastes. Approach: The carbon and the nitrogen of the microbial biomass (BC and BN) were studied using the fumigation-extraction method. Results: The dynamics of the BC/BN ratio, index of the chemical composition of the whole microbial population su...

Stimulating in situ microbial communities in oil reservoirs to produce natural gas is a potentially viable strategy for recovering additional fossil fuel resources following traditional recovery operations. Little is known about what geochemical parameters drive microbial population dynamics in biodegraded, methanogenic oil reservoirs. We investigated if microbial community structure was signif...

In contrast with macroorganisms, whose geographical ranges are typically restricted, many microbial species appear to have cosmopolitan distributions. This observation has been explained as a consequence of ubiquitous dispersal caused by the enormous population sizes of microbial species. Recently, this "everything is everywhere, but, the environment selects" theory has been challenged by the d...

The ever increasing pile-up of electronic waste in dumping sites, especially in developing countries such as China, Pakistan, India and several African countries, might have caused a significant alteration in the microbial community of the contaminated sites. This change in the microbial population may have significant impact to the soil ecology function. The major pollutants of electronic wast...

This issue is dedicated to the memory of Michel Blot, who died in a tragic accident in the French Alps in September 2002, bringing his fruitful scientific activities to a sudden end. After having completed his basic and doctoral education in population biology of eukaryotic organisms, Michel Blot joined my laboratory in 1989 with the intention of becoming familiar with microbial genetics and of...

BACKGROUND Factors like ethnicity, diet and age of an individual have been hypothesized to play a role in determining the makeup of gut microbiome. In order to investigate the gut microbiome structure as well as the inter-microbial associations present therein, we have performed a comprehensive global comparative profiling of the structure (composition, relative heterogeneity and diversity) and...