Phylogeny- and Abundance-Based Metrics Allow for the Consistent Comparison of Core Gut Microbiome Diversity Indices Across Host Species

The filtering of gut microbial datasets to retain high prevalence taxa is often performed to identify a common core gut microbiome that may be important for host biological functions. However, prevalence thresholds used to identify a common core are highly variable, and it remains unclear how they affect diversity estimates and whether insights stemming from core microbiomes are comparable across studies. We hypothesized that if macroecological patterns in gut microbiome prevalence and abundance are similar across host species, then we would expect that increasing prevalence thresholds would yield similar changes to alpha diversity and beta dissimilarity scores across host species datasets. We analyzed eight gut microbiome datasets based on 16S rRNA gene amplicon sequencing and collected from different host species to (1) compare macroecological patterns across datasets, including amplicon sequence variant (ASV) detection rate with sequencing depth and sample size, occupancy-abundance curves, and rank-abundance curves; (2) test whether increasing prevalence thresholds generate universal or host-species specific effects on alpha and beta diversity scores; and (3) test whether diversity scores from prevalence-filtered core communities correlate with unfiltered data. We found that gut microbiomes collected from diverse hosts demonstrated similar ASV detection rates with sequencing depth, yet required different sample sizes to sufficiently capture rare ASVs across the host population. This suggests that sample size rather than sequencing depth tends to limit the ability of studies to detect rare ASVs across the host population. Despite differences in the distribution and detection of rare ASVs, microbiomes exhibited similar occupancy-abundance and rank-abundance curves. Consequently, increasing prevalence thresholds generated remarkably similar trends in standardized alpha diversity and beta dissimilarity across species datasets until high thresholds above 70%. At this point, diversity scores tended to become unpredictable for some diversity measures. Moreover, high prevalence thresholds tended to generate diversity scores that correlated poorly with the original unfiltered data. Overall, we recommend that high prevalence thresholds over 70% are avoided, and promote the use of diversity measures that account for phylogeny and abundance (Balance-weighted phylogenetic diversity and Weighted Unifrac for alpha and beta diversity, respectively), because we show that these measures are insensitive to prevalence filtering and therefore allow for the consistent comparison of core gut microbiomes across studies without the need for prevalence filtering

Polynucleotide phosphorylase is involved in the control of lipopeptide fengycin production in Bacillus subtilis

Bacillus subtilis is a wealth source of lipopeptide molecules such as iturins, surfactins and fengycins or plipastatins endowed with a range of biological activities. These molecules, designated secondary metabolites, are synthesized via non-ribosomal peptides synthesis (NRPS) machinery and are most often subjected to a complex regulation with involvement of several regulatory factors. To gain novel insights on mechanism regulating fengycin production, we investigated the effect of the fascinating polynucleotide phosphorylase (PNPase), as well as the effect of lipopeptide surfactin. Compared to the wild type, the production of fengycin in the mutant strains B. subtilis BBG235 and BBG236 altered for PNPase has not only decreased to about 70 and 40%, respectively, but also hampered its antifungal activity towards the plant pathogen Botrytis cinerea. On the other hand, mutant strains BBG231 (srfAA−) and BBG232 (srfAC−) displayed different levels of fengycin production. BBG231 had registered an important decrease in fengycin production, comparable to that observed for BBG235 or BBG236. This study permitted to establish that the products of pnpA gene (PNPase), and srfAA− (surfactin synthetase) are involved in fengycin production. © 2018, Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature

Phylogeny-and abundance-based metrics allow for the consistent comparison of core gut microbiome diversity indices across host species

The filtering of gut microbial datasets to retain high prevalence taxa is often performed to identify a common core gut microbiome that may be important for host biological functions. However, prevalence thresholds used to identify a common core are highly variable, and it remains unclear how they affect diversity estimates and whether insights stemming from core microbiomes are comparable across studies. We hypothesized that if macroecological patterns in gut microbiome prevalence and abundance are similar across host species, then we would expect that increasing prevalence thresholds would yield similar changes to alpha diversity and beta dissimilarity scores across host species datasets. We analyzed eight gut microbiome datasets based on 16S rRNA gene amplicon sequencing and collected from different host species to (1) compare macroecological patterns across datasets, including amplicon sequence variant (ASV) detection rate with sequencing depth and sample size, occupancy-abundance curves, and rank-abundance curves; (2) test whether increasing prevalence thresholds generate universal or host-species specific effects on alpha and beta diversity scores; and (3) test whether diversity scores from prevalence-filtered core communities correlate with unfiltered data. We found that gut microbiomes collected from diverse hosts demonstrated similar ASV detection rates with sequencing depth, required different sample sizes to sufficiently capture rare ASVs across the host population. This suggests that sample size rather than sequencing depth tends to limit the ability of studies to detect rare ASVs across the host population. Despite differences in the distribution and detection of rare ASVs, microbiomes exhibited similar occupancy-abundance and rank-abundance curves. Consequently, increasing prevalence thresholds generated remarkably similar trends in standardized alpha diversity and beta dissimilarity across species datasets until high thresholds above 70%. At this point, diversity scores tended to become unpredictable for some diversity measures. Moreover, high prevalence Frontiers in Microbiology. Filtering Effects on Core Microbiome thresholds tended to generate diversity scores that correlated poorly with the original unfiltered data. Overall, we recommend that high prevalence thresholds over 70% are avoided, and promote the use of diversity measures that account for phylogeny and abundance (Balance-weighted phylogenetic diversity and Weighted Unifrac for alpha and beta diversity, respectively), because we show that these measures are insensitive to prevalence filtering and therefore allow for the consistent comparison of core gut microbiomes across studies without the need for prevalence filtering.publishedVersio

Lipopeptide biodiversity in antifungal Bacillus strains isolated from Algeria

Several Bacillus strains have been well studied for their ability to control soil-borne plant diseases. This property is linked to the production of several families of lipopeptides. Depending of their structure, these compounds show antifungal and/or plant systemic resistance inducing activities. In this work, the biodiversity of lipopeptides produced by different antifungal Bacillus strains isolated from seeds, rhizospheric, and non-rhizospheric soils in Algeria was analyzed. Sixteen active strains were characterized by PCR for their content in genes involved in lipopeptide biosynthesis and by MALDI-ToF for their lipopeptide production, revealing a high biodiversity of products. The difficulty to detect kurstakin genes led us to design two new sets of specific primers. An interesting potential of antifungal activity and the synthesis of two forms of fengycins differing in the eighth amino acid (Gln/Glu) were found from the strain 8. Investigation of its genome led to the finding of an adenylation domain of the fengycin synthetase predicted to activate the glutamate residue instead of the glutamine one. According to the comparison of both the results of MALDI-ToF-MS and genome analysis, it was concluded that this adenylation domain could activate both residues at the same time. This study highlighted that the richness of the Algerian ecosystems in Bacillus strains is able to produce: surfactin, pumilacidin, lichenysin, kurstakin, and different types of fengycins. © 2018 Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Natur

Systematic Mutational Analysis of the Intracellular Regions of Yeast Gap1 Permease

The yeast general amino acid permease Gap1 is a convenient model for studying the intracellular trafficking of membrane proteins. Present at the plasma membrane when the nitrogen source is poor, it undergoes ubiquitin-dependent endocytosis and degradation upon addition of a good nitrogen source, e.g. ammonium. It comprises 12 transmembrane domains (TM) flanked by cytosol-facing N- and C-terminal tails (NT, CT). The NT of Gap1 contains the acceptor lysines for ubiquitylation and its CT includes a sequence essential to exit from the endoplasmic reticulum (ER).Journal ArticleResearch Support, Non-U.S. Gov'tSCOPUS: ar.jinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishe

Development and analysis of the Soil Water Infiltration Global database.

In this paper, we present and analyze a novel global database of soil infiltration measurements, the Soil Water Infiltration Global (SWIG) database. In total, 5023 infiltration curves were collected across all continents in the SWIG database. These data were either provided and quality checked by the scientists who performed the experiments or they were digitized from published articles. Data from 54 different countries were included in the database with major contributions from Iran, China, and the USA. In addition to its extensive geographical coverage, the collected infiltration curves cover research from 1976 to late 2017. Basic information on measurement location and method, soil properties, and land use was gathered along with the infiltration data, making the database valuable for the development of pedotransfer functions (PTFs) for estimating soil hydraulic properties, for the evaluation of infiltration measurement methods, and for developing and validating infiltration models. Soil textural information (clay, silt, and sand content) is available for 3842 out of 5023 infiltration measurements (~76%) covering nearly all soil USDA textural classes except for the sandy clay and silt classes. Information on land use is available for 76% of the experimental sites with agricultural land use as the dominant type (~40%). We are convinced that the SWIG database will allow for a better parameterization of the infiltration process in land surface models and for testing infiltration models. All collected data and related soil characteristics are provided online in *.xlsx and *.csv formats for reference, and we add a disclaimer that the database is for public domain use only and can be copied freely by referencing it. Supplementary data are available at https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.885492 (Rahmati et al., 2018). Data quality assessment is strongly advised prior to any use of this database. Finally, we would like to encourage scientists to extend and update the SWIG database by uploading new data to it

The European Solar Telescope

The European Solar Telescope (EST) is a project aimed at studying the magnetic connectivity of the solar atmosphere, from the deep photosphere to the upper chromosphere. Its design combines the knowledge and expertise gathered by the European solar physics community during the construction and operation of state-of-the-art solar telescopes operating in visible and near-infrared wavelengths: the Swedish 1m Solar Telescope, the German Vacuum Tower Telescope and GREGOR, the French Télescope Héliographique pour l'Étude du Magnétisme et des Instabilités Solaires, and the Dutch Open Telescope. With its 4.2 m primary mirror and an open configuration, EST will become the most powerful European ground-based facility to study the Sun in the coming decades in the visible and near-infrared bands. EST uses the most innovative technological advances: the first adaptive secondary mirror ever used in a solar telescope, a complex multi-conjugate adaptive optics with deformable mirrors that form part of the optical design in a natural way, a polarimetrically compensated telescope design that eliminates the complex temporal variation and wavelength dependence of the telescope Mueller matrix, and an instrument suite containing several (etalon-based) tunable imaging spectropolarimeters and several integral field unit spectropolarimeters. This publication summarises some fundamental science questions that can be addressed with the telescope, together with a complete description of its major subsystems