Many organisms participate in symbiotic relationships with other organisms, yet studies of symbioses typically have focused on the reciprocal costs and benefits within a particular host-symbiont pair. Recent studies indicate that many ecological interactions involve alliances of symbionts acting together as mutualistic consortia against other consortia. Such interacting consortia are likely to ...

Foreign trade expansion plays an important role in economic growth and development. Since Iran’s single-product economy is facing tight sanctions, among trading partners, Turkey benefits from special place, and political independence in international relations because of its large population, rising per capita income, high economic growth rate, geographical and cultural proximity to Iran. Many ...

Deconstructing the intricate matrix of cellulose, hemicellulose, and lignin poses a major challenge in biofuel production. In diverse environments in nature, some microbial communities, are able to overcome plant biomass recalcitrance. Identifying key degraders of each component of plant cell wall can help improve biological degradation of plant feedstock. Here, we sequenced the metagenome of l...

Microbial autotroph-heterotroph interactions influence biogeochemical cycles on a global scale, but the diversity and complexity of natural systems and their intractability to in situ manipulation make it challenging to elucidate the principles governing these interactions. The study of assembling phototrophic biofilm communities provides a robust means to identify such interactions and evaluat...

In recent years, increasing monopolization tendencies in the market for electronic information resources in the academic sector have led to the formation of consortia by university libraries and other academic institutions, which are intended to act as an antipole to increase their bargaining power against the monopolistic structures of the publisher market. The aim of this research paper is th...

Biomining, the use of micro-organisms to recover precious and base metals from mineral ores and concentrates, has developed into a successful and expanding area of biotechnology. While careful considerations are made in the design and engineering of biomining operations, microbiological aspects have been subjected to far less scrutiny and control. Biomining processes employ microbial consortia ...

Metagenomics has revealed hundreds of species in almost all microbiota. In a few well-studied cases, microbial communities have been observed to coordinate their metabolic fluxes. In principle, microbes can divide tasks to reap the benefits of specialization, as in human economies. However, the benefits and stability of an economy of microbial specialists are far from obvious. Here, we physical...