Notes

Age-Related Boost in Lactate Dehydrogenase Exercise inside Skeletal Muscle Decreases Lifetime in Drosophila.
Biofilms offer a safe environment that favors bacterial survival; for this reason, most pathogenic and environmental bacteria live integrated in biofilm communities. The development of biofilms is complex and involves many factors, which need to be studied in order to understand bacterial behavior and control biofilm formation when necessary. We used a collection of cold-adapted Antarctic Gram-negative bacteria to study whether their ability to form biofilms is associated with a capacity to produce membrane vesicles and secrete extracellular ATP. In most of the studied strains, no correlation was found between biofilm formation and these two factors. Only Shewanella vesiculosa M7T secreted high levels of extracellular ATP, and its membrane vesicles caused a significant increase in the speed and amount of biofilm formation. In this strain, an important portion of the exogenous ATP was contained in membrane vesicles, where it was protected from apyrase treatment. These results confirm that ATP influences biofilm formation. Although the role of extracellular ATP in prokaryotes is still not well understood, the metabolic cost of its production suggests it has an important function, such as a role in biofilm formation. Thus, the liberation of extracellular ATP through membrane vesicles and its function deserve further study.Fungi provide essential ecosystem services and engage in a variety of symbiotic relationships with trees. In this study, we investigate the spatial relationship of trees and fungi at a community level. We characterized the spatial dynamics for above- and belowground fungi using a series of forest monitoring plots, at nested spatial scales, located in the tropical South Pacific, in Vanuatu. Fungal communities from different habitats were sampled using metagenomic analysis of the nuclear ribosomal ITS1 region. Fungal communities exhibited strong distance-decay of similarity across our entire sampling range (3-110,000 m) and also at small spatial scales ( less then  50 m). Unexpectedly, this pattern was inverted at an intermediate scale (3.7-26 km). At large scales (80-110 km), belowground and aboveground fungal communities responded inversely to increasing geographic distance. Aboveground fungal community turnover (beta diversity) was best explained, at all scales, by geographic distance. In contrast, belowground fungal community turnover was best explained by geographic distance at small scales and tree community composition at large scales. Fungal communities from various habitats respond differently to the influences of habitat and geographic distance. At large geographic distances (80-110 km), community turnover for aboveground fungi is better explained by spatial distance, whereas community turnover for belowground fungi is better explained by plant community turnover. Future syntheses of spatial dynamics among fungal communities must explicitly consider geographic scale to appropriately contextualize community turnover.Rainforest aquatic ecosystems include complex habitats with scarce information on their unicellular eukaryote diversity and community structure. We have investigated the diversity of ciliates in freshwater and brackish environments along the Brazilian Atlantic Forest, based on the hypervariable V4 region of the 18S-rDNA obtained by high-throughput DNA sequencing. Our analyses detected 409 ciliate taxonomic units (OTUs), mostly attributed to the classes Oligohymenophorea and Spirotrichea. A total of 11 classes, 12 subclasses, 112 genera, and 144 species were reported. We found the following (a) the ciliate communities are more diverse in freshwater- than in Atlantic Forest-associated brackish environments; (b) the ciliate communities are composed by a small amount of highly abundant OTUs, but a high number of low-abundant or rare OTUs; (c) nearly one-third of the ciliate OTUs share less than 97% sequence identity to reference sequences and (d) phylogenetic inference supports the hypothesis that the V4 region of the Ciliophora 18S-rDNA is a suitable marker for accurate evolutionary inferences at class level. Our results showed that a considerable fraction of the HTS-detected diversity of ciliates from Brazilian Atlantic Forest is not represented in the currently available molecular databases.The success of members of the genus Rhodococcus in colonizing arid rocky environments is owed in part to desiccation tolerance and an ability to extract iron through the secretion and uptake of siderophores. Here, we report a comprehensive genomic and taxonomic analysis of Rhodococcus qingshengii strain S10 isolated from eathered serpentine rock at the arid Khalilovsky massif, Russia. Sequence comparisons of whole genomes and of selected marker genes clearly showed strain S10 to belong to the R. qingshengii species. Four prophage sequences within the R. qingshengii S10 genome were identified, one of which encodes for a putative siderophore-interacting protein. Among the ten non-ribosomal peptides synthase (NRPS) clusters identified in the strain S10 genome, two show high homology to those responsible for siderophore synthesis. selleck compound Phenotypic analyses demonstrated that R. qingshengii S10 secretes siderophores and possesses adaptive features (tolerance of up to 8% NaCl and pH 9) that should enable survival in its native habitat within dry serpentine rock.Despite the excitement that followed the report of infrasound sensitivity in pigeons 40 years ago, there has been limited followup, with only eleven species of birds having auditory thresholds at frequencies below 250 Hz. With such sparse data on low-frequency hearing, there is little understanding of why some birds hear very low frequencies while others do not. To begin to expand the phylogenetic and ecological sample of low-frequency hearing in birds, we determined the behavioral audiogram of the Indian peafowl, Pavo cristatus. Peafowl are thought to use low frequencies generated by the males' tail feathers and wing flutters during courtship displays, and their crest feathers are reported to resonate at infrasound frequencies. The peafowl were able to respond to frequencies as low as 4 Hz, and their hearing range at 60 dB SPL extended from 29 Hz to 7.065 kHz (7.9 octaves). Removing the crest feathers reduced sensitivity at their resonant frequencies by as much as 7.5 dB, indicating a modest contribution to detectability in that range.
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