Copyright: © 2014 Xiong Li, et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Soils are known to be “skin of the earth” and carry the material basis for human beings. As one of the basic disciplines of ag...

The potential impact of environmental change on terrestrial Antarctic ecosystems can be explored by inspecting biodiversity patterns across large-scale gradients. Unfortunately, morphology-based surveys of Antarctic invertebrates are time-consuming and limited by the cryptic nature of many taxa. We used biodiversity information derived from high-throughput sequencing (HTS) to elucidate the rela...

A study was conducted at Universiti Putra Malaysia to determine the effect of phosphate-solubilizing bacteria (PSB) and organic acids (oxalic & malic) on phosphate (P) solubilization from phosphate rock (PR) and growth of aerobic rice. Four rates of each organic acid (0, 10, 20, and 30 mM), and PSB strain (Bacillus sp.) were applied to aerobic rice. Total bacterial populations, amount of P solu...

The study investigations were focused on assessing the influence of a 35-year-old municipal waste landfill on environmental mercury pollution. The total Hg content was determined in the soil profile, groundwater, and the plants (Solidago virgaurea and Poaceae sp.) in the landfill area. Environmental pollution near the landfill was relatively low. The topsoil layer, groundwater and the leaves of...

Ciliates (or Ciliophora) are ubiquitous organisms which can be widely used as bioindicators in ecosystems exposed to anthropogenic and industrial influences. The evaluation of the environmental impact on soil ciliate communities with methods relying on morphology-based identification may be hampered by the large number of samples usually required for a statistically supported, reliable conclusi...

Seed mass in species-rich moist tropical forests often varies over six or more orders of magnitude (Foster, 1982; Foster and Janson, 1985; Hammond and Brown, 1995). Most of these species, including some with the minutest seeds (Metcalfe, 1996; Metcalfe and Grubb, 1997), can be classified as ‘shade-tolerant’ with the ability to establish beneath a closed canopy. Seeds of the shade-tolerators var...

Soil nematode feeding groups are a long-established trophic categorisation largely based on morphology and are used in ecological indices to monitor and analyse the biological state of soils. Stable isotope ratio analysis ((13)C/(12)C and (15)N/(14)N, expressed as δ (13)C and δ (15)N) has provided verification of, and novel insights into, the feeding ecology of soil animals such as earthworms a...

Soil nematodes play crucial roles in the soil food web and are a suitable indicator for assessing soil environments and ecosystems. Previous nematode community analyses based on nematode morphology classification have been shown to be useful for assessing various soil environments. Here we have conducted DNA barcode analysis for soil nematode community analyses in Japanese soils. We isolated ne...

Neosporosis was diagnosed in a 16-year-old female white rhinoceros (Ceratotherium simum) that died suddenly without clinical signs. Histopathology revealed disseminated protozoan tachyzoites in liver, adrenal cortex, kidney, and intestine, with morphology compatible with either Toxoplasma or Neospora. The organism was identified as Neospora caninum with the use of primary rabbit anti-N. caninum...

The existence of tuberculosis in the pre-Columbian Americas is controversial because the morphology of the lesion is not specific, the organism is culturally nonviable in ancient tissues, and nonpathogenic soil mycobacteria can contaminate buried bodies. We report the recovery of DNA unique to Mycobacterium tuberculosis from a lung lesion of a spontaneously mummified, 1000-year-old adult female...