A simple, rapid method for bacterial lysis and direct extraction of DNA from soils with minimal shearing was developed to address the risk of chimera formation from small template DNA during subsequent PCR. The method was based on lysis with a high-salt extraction buffer (1.5 M NaCl) and extended heating (2 to 3 h) of the soil suspension in the presence of sodium dodecyl sulfate (SDS), hexadecy...

Ammonia-oxidizing organisms play an important role in wetland water purification and nitrogen cycling. We determined soil nitrification rates and investigated the seasonal and spatial distributions of ammonia-oxidizing archaea (AOA) and ammonia-oxidizing bacteria (AOB) in three freshwater wetlands by using specific primers targeting the amoA genes of AOA and AOB and real-time quantitative polym...

Given that cultivated land serves as a strategic resource to ensure national food security, blind emphasis on improvement of production capacity can lead soil overutilization and impair other functions. Therefore, we took Heilongjiang province an example conduct multi-functional evaluation at the provincial scale. A combination soil, climate, topography, use, remote sensing data were used evalu...

BACKGROUND Mycobacterium bovis is the aetiological agent of bovine tuberculosis (bTB), an important recrudescent zoonosis, significantly increasing in British herds in recent years. Wildlife reservoirs have been identified for this disease but the mode of transmission to cattle remains unclear. There is evidence that viable M. bovis cells can survive in soil and faeces for over a year. METHOD...

and plant growth (Rice, 1984), and are structural and functional components of soil organic matter (Haider Phenolic acids (PAs) released from plant residues have been impliet al., 1975). Phenolic acids have also been shown to cated as important components in a variety of soil processes. To regulate the residue decomposition rate (Meentemeyer evaluate the role of plant PAs in soil processes, a q...