Benjamin S. Halpern,* Elizabeth T. Borer, Eric W. Seabloom and Jonathan B. Shurin National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis, 735 State St., Santa Barbara, CA 93101, USA Dept. of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of California, Santa Cruz, CA 95060, USA Dept. of Zoology, Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR 97331, USA Dept. of Zoology, University of British Columbia, 627...

Global-scale environmental problems are rarely regarded as amenable to traditional scientific experiment. We argue here that small-scale experiments using 'model organisms' in microcosms or mesocosms can be a useful approach for apparently intractable global problems, such as ecosystem responses to climate change or managing biodiversity through the design of nature reserves. An experimental, s...

While all organisms on Earth share a common descent, there is no consensus on whether the origin of the ancestral self-replicator was a one-off event or whether it only represented the final survivor of multiple origins. Here, we use the digital evolution system Avida to study the origin of self-replicating computer programs. By using a computational system, we avoid many of the uncertainties i...

During the Deepwater Horizon oil well blowout in the Gulf of Mexico, the application of 7 million liters of chemical dispersants aimed to stimulate microbial crude oil degradation by increasing the bioavailability of oil compounds. However, the effects of dispersants on oil biodegradation rates are debated. In laboratory experiments, we simulated environmental conditions comparable to the hydro...

Dicyandiamide, a routinely used commercial nitrification inhibitor (NI), inhibits ammonia oxidation catalyzed by ammonia monooxygenase (AMO). Phenylhydrazine hydrochloride has shown considerable potential for the development of next-generation NIs targeting hydroxylamine dehydrogenase (HAO). The effects of the AMO inhibitor and the HAO inhibitor on ammonia-oxidizing bacteria (AOB) and ammonia-o...

A deeper understanding of the microbial community structure is very important in bioremediation for polychlorinated dibenzo-p-dioxins/dibenzofurans (PCDD/Fs). However, this has been insufficiently addressed in previous studies. To obtain more information, we pyrosequenced the V4/V5 regions of the 16S rRNA genes of bacterial communities transited from polluted soil to batch microcosms that rapid...

A semicontinuous slurry-microcosm method was applied to mimic trichloroethylene (TCE) cometabolic biodegradation field results at the Que-Jen in-situ pilot study. The microcosm study confirmed the process of aerobic cometabolism of TCE using toluene as the primary substrate. Based on the nucleotide sequence of 16S rRNA genes, the toluene-oxidizing bacteria in microcosms were identified, i.e. Ra...

This paper discusses the issues involved in putting the media into a hypermedia system. The main argument of the paper is that to-date media representation and underlying link strategies have been too closely tied together in the move from hypertext to hypermedia. We argue that it is necessary to separate the issues of media from link structure, and we present a model which solves some of the p...

OBJECTIVE This study evaluated whether Quantitative Light-induced Fluorescence-Digital (QLF-D) can detect the levels of cariogenicity of dental microcosm biofilms by assessing the red fluorescence intensity. METHODS Dental microcosm biofilms were initiated from human saliva on bovine enamel discs. Biofilms with various levels of cariogenicity were then grown in artificial saliva supplemented ...

A microcosm cultivation-based method was set up to investigate the growth of ammonia-oxidizing archaea (AOA), isolated from a water sample acquired at a depth of 50 m from the northern basin of Lake Kivu. For this purpose, both CARD-FISH and qPCR targeting of archaeal 16S rRNA and amoA genes were used. Archaeal cell growth at the end of the 246-day microcosm experiment accounted for 35% of the ...