diversity

A reinterpretation of biological process, evolution and genetics, the physical world is presented that integrates a re-examination of meaning in Einsteins relativity, involves a visit to Euclids parallel postulate, and the mathematics and geometry of the mobius strip. An entity, the concept, mass-less, unwitnessible with both energy and location is proposed to exist within a scheme of energized mobius parallels that extend beyond the plane of writing paper. And are employed to account...

Comprehensive characterization of genomic composition in environmental microbial samples has been challenging, because the majority of microorganisms are difficult to culture. Additional challenges include a high degree of genetic diversity between and within species, various level of relative abundance and ubiquitous presence of cell-free DNA. Single cells or single molecules genomic assays hold great promise for tackling these challenges. Recent progresses in the developments of these...

Unicellular eukaryotes are responsible for a massive amount of photosynthetic carbon fixation in marine systems. The smallest among these fall within the “pico” size fraction (<2 micrometers in diameter), are broadly distributed – from coastal to open-ocean environments – and are highly diverse. Picoeukaryotes contribute a significant proportion of the biomass and primary production within this size fraction, often rivaling their cyanobacterial counterparts Prochlorococcus and...

The deep-ocean accounts for the majority of the water on our planet. While the cold deep-ocean is the dominant nutrient-challenged ecosystem, hydrothermal vents represent oases along tectonically active areas of the seafloor. Hydrothermal vents and the surrounding cold deep-ocean each support unique communities of microbes and viruses that have become highly adapted to local conditions. Through cycles of infection and host cell lysis, bacteriophages (viruses that specifically infect...

Metagenomic approaches are being use to investigate many diverse ecosystems and reveal many novel functions therein. However these methods can frequently pass over the DNA which we find in the mobile metagenome or mobilome. Much of this DNA is not easily cloned into fosmids or BACs for functional analysis and DNA based metagenomics projects do not always provide sufficient information to determine from where the sequence arose, genome or mobilome. Couple these limitations to the fact that the...

Elizabeth A. Grice of National Institutes of Health discusses "Diversity Profile of the Human Skin Microbiome in Health and Disease"