Contents 1. Introduction – biodiversity in agricultural ecosystems 2. Planned diversity and the functioning of agricultural systems 2.1. Intraspecific diversity 2.2. Species diversity 2.3. Habitat and landscape diversity 3. Unplanned diversity and the functioning of agricultural systems. 3.1. Pollination services 3.2. Soil processes 3.3. Natural pest control 4. Conclusions Bibliography Biograph...

The capsule polysaccharide locus (cps) is the site of the capsule biosynthesis gene cluster in encapsulated Streptococcus pneumoniae. A set of pneumococcal samples and non-pneumococcal streptococci from Denmark, the Gambia, the Netherlands, Thailand, the UK and the USA were sequenced at the cps locus to elucidate serologically mistyped or non-typable isolates. We identified a novel serotype 33B...

The evolution of multicellularity was one of the key innovations in the history of life on Earth. Virtually all morphological and ecological diversity in macro-organisms builds upon the evolutionary potential associated with multicellularity. We examined the potential for ecological diversity to rapidly arise following transitions to multicellularity. Replicate microcosms containing the yeast S...

Approximately 7000 marine zooplanktonic species have been described so far for the World Ocean; in the South Atlantic the presence of 40% of these has been confirmed, and an additional 20–30% are expected to be recorded in the future. The overall number of described species is very low when compared with other communities, and yet it may not be too far from the final, complete inventory. Very a...

Punctuated antigenic change is believed to be a key element in the evolution of influenza A; clusters of antigenically similar strains predominate worldwide for several years until an antigenically distant mutant emerges and instigates a selective sweep. It is thought that a region of East-Southeast Asia with year-round transmission acts as a source of antigenic diversity for influenza A and se...

In this paper‎, ‎we mainly investigate how the generalized metrizability properties of the remainders affect the metrizability of rectifiable spaces‎, ‎and how the character of the remainders affects the character‎ ‎and the size of a rectifiable space‎. ‎Some results in [A. V‎. ‎Arhangel'skii and J‎. ‎Van Mill‎, ‎On topological groups with a first-countable remainder‎, ‎Topology Proc. 42 (2013...

Single-source binary hybrid multilevel inverters with cascaded transformers have a bulky transformer connected to their main H-bridge cells in each phase. This bulky transformer has been eliminated in this work without any effect on operation and modulation strategies. The proposed topology has significant advantages from view point of dimensions and number of transformers, design of transforme...

Evolutionary algorithms are consistently troubled by early convergence to suboptimal solutions, and this problem is just as prevalent with distributed evolutionary algorithms (dEAs). One of several approaches used to address this issue (but still not much explored, especially in dEAs) is the use of diversity-guided control, where population diversity is monitored and steps are taken to boost di...