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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.
Recent expanded Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) listings for sharks and rays are welcome — yet seizing this opportunity requires that international trade policy is treated not as an end point, but as a catalyst for wider regulatory and market-based reforms.
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 high-throughput laboratory experiment tracking the assembly of soil-derived communities shows that species-rich bacterial necromass supports increasingly diverse communities, with each additional dead species expanding opportunities for niche partitioning.
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.
Across the planet, microorganisms that are phylogenetically related can be found in similar communities, which suggests shared ecological preferences. This global pattern, which we term ‘community conservatism’, parallels well-established macroscopic ecological concepts such as phylogenetic signal and niche conservatism.
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.
A clade-wide study of non-human primates shows that same-sex sexual behaviour typically appears in long-lived, sexually dimorphic species with complex social structures that experience predation, resource scarcity or environmental challenge.
This Perspective synthesizes insights from the past use of nature markets to identify design factors that are necessary if such markets are to achieve their environmental aims—although qualitative scoring of existing markets against these rules identifies pervasive gaps.
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.
