While well-recognized as an important kind of ecological interaction, physical ecosystem engineering by organisms is diverse with varied consequences, presenting challenges for developing and using general understanding. Th ere is also still some uncertainty as to what it is, and some skepticism that the diversity of engineering and its eff ects is amenable to conceptual integration and general...

Soil bacteria typically coexist with close relatives generating widespread phylogenetic clustering. This has been ascribed to the abiotic filtering of organisms with shared ecological tolerances. Recent theoretical developments suggest that competition can also explain the phylogenetic similarity of coexisting organisms by excluding large low-competitive clades. We propose that combining the en...

Plant cell walls provide structural support during development and represent together with the cuticle the first line of defense against biotic and abiotic stress. In recent years, evidence has accumulated that a dedicated plant cell wall integrity (CWI) maintenance mechanism exists. This mechanism monitors and maintains functional integrity of the cell wall during different biological processe...

To this day, computer models for stromatolite formation have made substantial use of the Kardar-Parisi-Zhang (KPZ) equation. Oddly enough, these studies yielded mutually exclusive conclusions about the biotic or abiotic origin of such structures. We show in this paper that, at our current state of knowledge, a purely biotic origin for stromatolites can neither be proved nor disproved by means o...

Theoretical models predict weakening of negative biotic interactions and strengthening of positive interactions with increasing abiotic stress. However, most empirical tests have been restricted to plant-plant interactions. No empirical study has examined theoretical predictions of interactions between plants and below-ground micro-organisms, although soil biota strongly regulates plant communi...

Although abiotic factors, together with dispersal and biotic interactions, are often suggested to explain the distribution of species and their abundances, species distribution models usually focus on abiotic factors only. We propose an integrative framework linking ecological theory, empirical data and statistical models to understand the distribution of species and their abundances together w...

Animals and plants respond to bacterial infections and environmental stresses by inducing overlapping repertoires of defense genes. How the signals associated with infection and abiotic stresses are differentially integrated within a whole organism remains to be fully addressed. We show that the transcription of a C. elegans ABC transporter, pgp-5 is induced by both bacterial infection and heav...

background: sustainable and commercial production of secondary metabolites is a critical issue when dealing with its clinical application. efforts are still being made to look for biotic or abiotic elicitors with more efficient and universal effects on the improvement of secondary metabolites. objective: in order to evaluate the suitability of different biotic elicitors on p. harmala l. cell su...