Ruminants are completely dependent on their microbiota for feed digestion and consequently, their viability. It is therefore tempting to hypothesize a connection between the composition and abundance of resident rumen bacterial taxa and the physiological parameters of the host. Using a pyrosequencing approach, we characterized the rumen bacterial community composition in 15 dairy cows and their...

Cryptic belowground organisms are difficult to observe and their responses to global changes are not well understood. Nevertheless, there is reason to believe that interactions among aboveand belowground communities may mediate ecosystem responses to global change. We used grassland mesocosms to manipulate the abundance of one important group of soil organisms, arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungi...

community participation, as one of the basic components of sustainable development in a community. this study aimed to determine patterns of community participation, identify factors associated with their social and civic engagement, and examine the relation between the factors and community engagement patterns. patterns of citizen participation were determined in social and civic engagements. ...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE This study evaluated clustering of stroke hospitalization rates, patterns of the clustering over time, and associations with community-level characteristics. METHODS We used Medicare hospital claims data from 1995-1996 to 2005-2006 with a principal discharge diagnosis of stroke to calculate county-level stroke hospitalization rates. We identified statistically significa...

If changes in the composition of the soil microbial community alter the physiological capacity of the community then such changes may have ecosystem consequences. We examined the relationships among community composition (PLFA), microbial biomass (CFDE), substrate utilization profiles (BIOLOG), lignocellulose degrading enzyme activities (b-glucosidase, cellobiohydrolase, b-xylosidase, phenol ox...

The use of juvenile Artemia as feed in aquaculture and in the pet shop industry has been getting more attention during the last decade. In this study, the use of selected bacterial strains to improve the nutritional value of dry food for Artemia juveniles and to obtain control of the associated microbial community was examined. Nine bacterial strains were selected based on their positive effect...

We provide in this paper a pair of properties that are both necessary and sufficient to characterize the domain of single-peaked preference profiles. This characterization allows for a definition of single-peaked preference profiles without using an ad-hoc unlerlying order of the alternatives and also sheds light on the structure of single-peaked profiles. Considering the larger domain of value...

In this paper we present a system architecture for coupling user and community profiling to the information search process. The search process and the ranking of relevant documents are accomplished within the context of a particular user or community point of view. The user and community profiles are built by analyzing document collections put together by the users and by the communities to whi...