Pyrosequencing-Based Assessment of Bacterial Community Structure Along Different Management Types in German Forest and Grassland Soils

BACKGROUND: Soil bacteria are important drivers for nearly all biogeochemical cycles in terrestrial ecosystems and participate in most nutrient transformations in soil. In contrast to the importance of soil bacteria for ecosystem functioning, we understand little how different management types affect the soil bacterial community composition. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: We used pyrosequencing-based analysis of the V2-V3 16S rRNA gene region to identify changes in bacterial diversity and community structure in nine forest and nine grassland soils from the Schwäbische Alb that covered six different management types. The dataset comprised 598,962 sequences that were affiliated to the domain Bacteria. The number of classified sequences per sample ranged from 23,515 to 39,259. Bacterial diversity was more phylum rich in grassland soils than in forest soils. The dominant taxonomic groups across all samples (>1% of all sequences) were Acidobacteria, Alphaproteobacteria, Actinobacteria, Betaproteobacteria, Deltaproteobacteria, Gammaproteobacteria, and Firmicutes. Significant variations in relative abundances of bacterial phyla and proteobacterial classes, including Actinobacteria, Firmicutes, Verrucomicrobia, Cyanobacteria, Gemmatimonadetes and Alphaproteobacteria, between the land use types forest and grassland were observed. At the genus level, significant differences were also recorded for the dominant genera Phenylobacter, Bacillus, Kribbella, Streptomyces, Agromyces, and Defluviicoccus. In addition, soil bacterial community structure showed significant differences between beech and spruce forest soils. The relative abundances of bacterial groups at different taxonomic levels correlated with soil pH, but little or no relationships to management type and other soil properties were found. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: Soil bacterial community composition and diversity of the six analyzed management types showed significant differences between the land use types grassland and forest. Furthermore, bacterial community structure was largely driven by tree species and soil pH

Digital Traces of Distinction? Popular Orientation and User-Engagement with Status Hierarchies in TripAdvisor Reviews of Cultural Organizations

Cultural organizations are categorized by cultural products (high or popular culture) and by organizational form (nonprofit or commercial). In sociology, these classifications are understood predominantly through a Bourdieusian lens, which links cultural consumption to habitus and a class-based struggle for distinction. However, people’s engagement with institutionalized cultural classifications may be expressed differently on the Internet, where a culture of hierarchy-free equality is (sometimes) idealized. Using digital trace data from a representative sample of 280 user-generated reviews of four London cultural organizations, we find that reviewers are concerned with practical issues over cultural content, displaying a popular orientation to cultural consumption (an “audience-focus” or an “embodied” approach). A very small minority of reviewers claim status honor on a variety of bases, including symbolic mastery of traditional cultural capital. Overall, we find an online space in the cultural sphere in which cultural hierarchies are not relevant

A New Mechanistic Scenario for the Origin and Evolution of Vertebrate Cartilage

The appearance of cellular cartilage was a defining event in vertebrate evolution because it made possible the physical expansion of the vertebrate “new head”. Despite its central role in vertebrate evolution, the origin of cellular cartilage has been difficult to understand. This is largely due to a lack of informative evolutionary intermediates linking vertebrate cellular cartilage to the acellular cartilage of invertebrate chordates. The basal jawless vertebrate, lamprey, has long been considered key to understanding the evolution of vertebrate cartilage. However, histological analyses of the lamprey head skeleton suggest it is composed of modern cellular cartilage and a putatively unrelated connective tissue called mucocartilage, with no obvious transitional tissue. Here we take a molecular approach to better understand the evolutionary relationships between lamprey cellular cartilage, gnathostome cellular cartilage, and lamprey mucocartilage. We find that despite overt histological similarity, lamprey and gnathostome cellular cartilage utilize divergent gene regulatory networks (GRNs). While the gnathostome cellular cartilage GRN broadly incorporates Runx, Barx, and Alx transcription factors, lamprey cellular cartilage does not express Runx or Barx, and only deploys Alx genes in certain regions. Furthermore, we find that lamprey mucocartilage, despite its distinctive mesenchymal morphology, deploys every component of the gnathostome cartilage GRN, albeit in different domains. Based on these findings, and previous work, we propose a stepwise model for the evolution of vertebrate cellular cartilage in which the appearance of a generic neural crest-derived skeletal tissue was followed by a phase of skeletal tissue diversification in early agnathans. In the gnathostome lineage, a single type of rigid cellular cartilage became dominant, replacing other skeletal tissues and evolving via gene cooption to become the definitive cellular cartilage of modern jawed vertebrates

Vampires in the village Žrnovo on the island of Korčula: following an archival document from the 18th century

Središnja tema rada usmjerena je na raščlambu spisa pohranjenog u Državnom arhivu u Mlecima (fond: Capi del Consiglio de’ Dieci: Lettere di Rettori e di altre cariche) koji se odnosi na događaj iz 1748. godine u korčulanskom selu Žrnovo, kada su mještani – vjerujući da su se pojavili vampiri – oskvrnuli nekoliko mjesnih grobova. U radu se podrobno iznose osnovni podaci iz spisa te rečeni događaj analizira u širem društvenom kontekstu i prate se lokalna vjerovanja.The main interest of this essay is the analysis of the document from the State Archive in Venice (file: Capi del Consiglio de’ Dieci: Lettere di Rettori e di altre cariche) which is connected with the episode from 1748 when the inhabitants of the village Žrnove on the island of Korčula in Croatia opened tombs on the local cemetery in the fear of the vampires treating. This essay try to show some social circumstances connected with this event as well as a local vernacular tradition concerning superstitions