Changes in Fungal Community Composition in Response to Elevated Atmospheric CO2 and Nitrogen Fertilization Varies with Soil Horizon

Increasing levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO(2)) and rates of nitrogen (N)-deposition to forest ecosystems are predicted to alter the structure and function of soil fungal communities, but the spatially heterogeneous distribution of soil fungi has hampered investigations aimed at understanding such impacts. We hypothesized that soil physical and chemical properties and fungal community composition would be differentially impacted by elevated atmospheric CO(2) (eCO(2)) and N-fertilization in spatially separated field samples, in the forest floor, 0–2, 2–5, and 5–10 cm depth intervals in a loblolly pine Free-Air Carbon Dioxide Enrichment (FACE) experiment. In all soils, quantitative PCR-based estimates of fungal biomass were highest in the forest floor. Fungal richness, based on pyrosequencing of the fungal ribosomal large subunit gene, increased in response to N-fertilization in 0–2 cm and forest floor intervals. Composition shifted in forest floor, 0–2 and 2–5 cm intervals in response to N-fertilization, but the shift was most distinct in the 0–2 cm interval, in which the largest number of statistically significant changes in soil chemical parameters (i.e., phosphorus, organic matter, calcium, pH) was also observed. In the 0–2 cm interval, increased recovery of sequences from the Thelephoraceae, Tricholomataceae, Hypocreaceae, Clavicipitaceae, and Herpotrichiellaceae families and decreased recovery of sequences from the Amanitaceae correlated with N-fertilization. In this same depth interval, Amanitaceae, Tricholomataceae, and Herpotriciellaceae sequences were recovered less frequently from soils exposed to eCO(2) relative to ambient conditions. These results demonstrated that vertical stratification should be taken into consideration in future efforts to elucidate environmental impacts on fungal communities and their feedbacks on ecosystem processes

Biological Consequences of Ancient Gene Acquisition and Duplication in the Large Genome of Candidatus Solibacter usitatus Ellin6076

Members of the bacterial phylum Acidobacteria are widespread in soils and sediments worldwide, and are abundant in many soils. Acidobacteria are challenging to culture in vitro, and many basic features of their biology and functional roles in the soil have not been determined. Candidatus Solibacter usitatus strain Ellin6076 has a 9.9 Mb genome that is approximately 2–5 times as large as the other sequenced Acidobacteria genomes. Bacterial genome sizes typically range from 0.5 to 10 Mb and are influenced by gene duplication, horizontal gene transfer, gene loss and other evolutionary processes. Our comparative genome analyses indicate that the Ellin6076 large genome has arisen by horizontal gene transfer via ancient bacteriophage and/or plasmid-mediated transduction, and widespread small-scale gene duplications, resulting in an increased number of paralogs. Low amino acid sequence identities among functional group members, and lack of conserved gene order and orientation in regions containing similar groups of paralogs, suggest that most of the paralogs are not the result of recent duplication events. The genome sizes of additional cultured Acidobacteria strains were estimated using pulsed-field gel electrophoresis to determine the prevalence of the large genome trait within the phylum. Members of subdivision 3 had larger genomes than those of subdivision 1, but none were as large as the Ellin6076 genome. The large genome of Ellin6076 may not be typical of the phylum, and encodes traits that could provide a selective metabolic, defensive and regulatory advantage in the soil environment

Trees over Infinite Structures and Path Logics with Synchronization

We provide decidability and undecidability results on the model-checking problem for infinite tree structures. These tree structures are built from sequences of elements of infinite relational structures. More precisely, we deal with the tree iteration of a relational structure M in the sense of Shelah-Stupp. In contrast to classical results where model-checking is shown decidable for MSO-logic, we show decidability of the tree model-checking problem for logics that allow only path quantifiers and chain quantifiers (where chains are subsets of paths), as they appear in branching time logics; however, at the same time the tree is enriched by the equal-level relation (which holds between vertices u, v if they are on the same tree level). We separate cleanly the tree logic from the logic used for expressing properties of the underlying structure M. We illustrate the scope of the decidability results by showing that two slight extensions of the framework lead to undecidability. In particular, this applies to the (stronger) tree iteration in the sense of Muchnik-Walukiewicz.Comment: In Proceedings INFINITY 2011, arXiv:1111.267

Patterns of Hamstring Muscle Tears in the General Population: A Systematic Review

BackgroundHamstring tears are well recognised in the sporting population. Little is known about these injuries in the general population.PurposeEvaluating the rates, patterns and risk factors of non-sporting hamstring tears, compared to sporting related hamstring tears.Data SourcesMEDLINE, EMBASE, CINAHL, and the Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials (1989–2015).Study SelectionStudies reporting patients with a grade 2 or 3 hamstring muscle tear, identified clinically, confirmed by MRI imaging or direct visualisation during surgical exploration.Data Synthesis144 sets of linked data were extracted for analysis. Most injuries were in males (81.3%), where mean age at injury was lower (30.2, 95% CI 29.1–31.3) than in females (35.4, 95% CI 32.4–38.4) p = 0.06. Key differences were found in the proportion of non-sporting injuries in patients under and over the age 40 (p = 0.001). The proportion of non-sporting injuries was significantly higher in females compared to males (25.9% female non-sporting injuries, versus 8.5% male; p = 0.02). Avulsions were more frequently reported in non-sporting activities (70.5%). The proportion of such injuries was notably higher in females, though this failed to meet significance (p = 0.124). Grouped by age category a bimodal distribution was noted, with the proportion of avulsions greater in younger (age 40) (p = 0.008). 86.8% of patients returned to pre-injury activity levels with a similar frequency across all study variables; age, activity (sporting vs non-sporting) and injury type (avulsion vs tear).ConclusionThis review highlights a proportion of adults suffering grade 2 or 3 hamstring injuries from activities other than the classic sports trauma. The majority of these non-sporting injuries were avulsion injuries that clustered in older female and skeletally immature patients suggesting a potential link to bone mineral density

A guided tour of asynchronous cellular automata

Research on asynchronous cellular automata has received a great amount of attention these last years and has turned to a thriving field. We survey the recent research that has been carried out on this topic and present a wide state of the art where computing and modelling issues are both represented.Comment: To appear in the Journal of Cellular Automat

The Nuclear Reaction Network WinNet

© 2023. The Author(s). Published by the American Astronomical Society. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY), https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/We present the state-of-the-art single-zone nuclear reaction network WinNet, which is capable of calculating the nucleosynthetic yields of a large variety of astrophysical environments and conditions. This ranges from the calculation of the primordial nucleosynthesis, where only a few nuclei are considered, to the ejecta of neutron star mergers with several thousands of involved nuclei. Here we describe the underlying physics and implementation details of the reaction network. We additionally present the numerical implementation of two different integration methods, the implicit Euler method and Gears method, along with their advantages and disadvantages. We furthermore describe basic example cases of thermodynamic conditions that we provide together with the network and demonstrate the reliability of the code by using simple test cases. With this publication, WinNet will be publicly available and open source at GitHub and Zenodo.Peer reviewe

Dynamics of Simple Balancing Models with State Dependent Switching Control

Time-delayed control in a balancing problem may be a nonsmooth function for a variety of reasons. In this paper we study a simple model of the control of an inverted pendulum by either a connected movable cart or an applied torque for which the control is turned off when the pendulum is located within certain regions of phase space. Without applying a small angle approximation for deviations about the vertical position, we see structurally stable periodic orbits which may be attracting or repelling. Due to the nonsmooth nature of the control, these periodic orbits are born in various discontinuity-induced bifurcations. Also we show that a coincidence of switching events can produce complicated periodic and aperiodic solutions.Comment: 36 pages, 12 figure