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HORBEC are protein complexes involved in the regulation of redox balance and energy conservation. The authors develop a bioinformatic tool for HORBEC annotation in bacterial and archaeal genomes and reconstruct the evolutionary history of these fundamental enzymes.
The authors leverage experimental and phylogenetic data to propose that anammox bacteria during the Archaean period could have harvested photoholes from cyanobacterial mats for use as an electron acceptor prior to the availability of nitrite.
A comparative analysis of trait data combined with a mathematical model suggests that dietary specialization drives selection towards the smallest and largest body sizes in terrestrial mammals, as generalists outcompete specialists at intermediate sizes.
In this study, the authors conduct experiments involving 276 soil-derived microcosms to reveal that the ecological process of necromass recycling promotes diversity maintenance in bacterial communities. This mechanism could help explain how high microbial species diversity is maintained in natural soil communities.
Citizen science data are increasingly used in biodiversity monitoring. This study applies a digital twin approach to biodiversity monitoring using a large citizen science dataset on birds from Finland, demonstrating its potential for ecological forecasting.
By combining satellite observations with ground-based data and expert validation, this analysis demonstrates considerable misestimation of grassland extent and thereby carbon stock estimates in previous global assessments based on remote sensing.
This study examines long-term changes in species richness across tropical forests in the Andes and Amazon. Hotter, drier and more seasonal forests in the eastern and southern Amazon are losing species, while Northern Andean forests are accumulating species, acting as a refuge for climate-displaced species.
A global synthesis of >600 studies finds that across agro-ecosystems, grasslands and forests in temperate and tropical zones, increasing plant diversity has a consistently positive effect on plant performance and the suppression of antagonists.
This study reveals that closely related microorganisms tend to inhabit similar communities across all major environments and phyla. The authors term this phenomenon ‘community conservatism’, extending the ecological concepts of phylogenetic signal and niche conservatism to the microbial world.
Phylogenetic regression and structural equation modelling of environmental, social and life history traits across the primate clade indicates correlates for same-sex sexual behaviour (SSB), and suggests that while environmental and life history traits tend to influence SSB indirectly, social complexity directly promotes its occurrence.
Predictions of human land-use expansion within existing terrestrial protected areas under four shared socio-economic pathways identify locations of particular vulnerability to natural habitat conversion and resulting effects on species’ habitat availability.
Analysis of the 3D chromatin architecture and cis-regulatory elements in a sea urchin and a sea star reveals mechanisms of 3D chromatin organization in echinoderms and the long-term evolutionary dynamics of cis-regulatory elements in animals.
Grazing affects plant diversity, but plant diversity in turn may modulate the effect of grazing on the plant community. This global analysis explores the association between plant species richness and plant cover resistance to grazing intensity in drylands.
Microbial mutualists could affect plant population persistence under climate change. Here the authors show that fungal endophytes contribute to the population persistence of a grass species by ameliorating drought stress but are more likely to disappear locally under climate variability.
Fine-scale field analysis and modelling of the spatial dynamics of infection of Darwin’s frogs with Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis fungus identifies highly localized transmission dynamics that generate clustered epidemics and can drive collapse of local subpopulations.
