Viscous Drag Reduction and Contour Feather Geometry in Water and Land Birds

Water birds have contour feathers in contact with water that show in their distal one-third adaptations to water repellency, resistance to water penetration and forceful impact with water. These qualities vary according to their intimacy with open water. In this study, the geometry of this part of the feather was examined to detect additional features that would affect viscous drag in water. The length-to-width ratio was measured and used to calculate the viscous drag coefficients for 48 water birds and, for comparison, 12 land birds. The lowest values for the drag coefficient were observed for birds with foraging niches as diving and swimming, followed by plunging, surface feeding, aerial and ground feeding. Land birds with no open water in their habitat had the highest drag coefficients. Three statistical approaches were used to validate the results. Allowing for the phylogenetic relatedness of the 60 species obscured any significant differences that may exist, but a non-parametric analysis that does not assume the conditions of equal sample size and variance turned out to be the most appropriate method for our data set

GEnView: a gene-centric, phylogeny-based comparative genomics pipeline for bacterial genomes and plasmids

Comparing genomic loci of a given bacterial gene across strains and species can provide insights into their evolution, including information on e.g. acquired mobility, the degree of conservation between different taxa or indications of horizontal gene transfer events. While thousands of bacterial genomes are available to date, there is no software that facilitates comparisons of individual gene loci for a large number of genomes. GEnView (Genetic Environment View) is a Python-based pipeline for the comparative analysis of gene-loci in a large number of bacterial genomes, providing users with automated, taxon-selective access to the >800.000 genomes and plasmids currently available in the NCBI Assembly and RefSeq databases, and is able to process local genomes that are not deposited at NCBI, enabling searches for genomic sequences and to analyze their genetic environments through the interactive visualization and extensive metadata files created by GEnView

Table S4

List of new aminoglycoside resistance genes predicted in this stud

Combining physicochemical properties and microbiome data to evaluate the water quality of South African drinking water production plants

Anthropogenic activities in catchments used for drinking water production largely contaminates source waters, and this may impact the quality of the final drinking water product. These contaminants may also affect taxonomic and functional profiles of the bacterial communities in the drinking water. Here, we report an integrated insight into the microbiome and water quality of four water treatment plants (NWC, NWE, WCA and NWG) that supply portable water to communities in South Africa. A new scoring system based on combined significant changes of physicochemical parameters and microbial abundance from raw to treated water was used to evaluate the effectiveness of the treatment plants at water purification. Physicochemical parameters which include total soluble solids, turbidity, pH, nitrites and phosphorus among others, were measured in source, treated, and distributed water. There were general statistically significant (P ≤ 0.05) differences between raw and treated water, demonstrating the effectiveness of the purification process. Illumina sequencing of the 16S rRNA gene was used for taxonomic profiling of the microbial communities and this data was used to infer functional attributes of the communities. Structure and composition of the bacterial communities differed significantly (P 0.05), this correlated with the predicted functional profile of the microbial communities obtained from Phylogenetic Investigation of Communities by Reconstruction of Observed States (PICRUSt), as well as the likely pollutants of source water. Bacteroidetes, Chlorobi and Fibrobacteres significantly differed (P < 0.05) between raw and distributed water. PICRUSt inferred a number of pathways involved in the degradation of xenobiotics such as Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, atrazine and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. More worryingly, was the presence of pathways involved in beta-lactam resistance, potential pathogenic Escherichia coli infection, Vibrio cholerae infection, and Shigellosis. Also present in drinking and treated water were OTUs associated with a number of opportunistic pathogen