Applied and Environmental Science
Research Article | Applied and Environmental ScienceMetatranscriptomes Reveal That All Three Domains of Life Are Active but Are Dominated by Bacteria in the Fennoscandian Crystalline Granitic Continental Deep BiosphereA newly designed sampling apparatus was used to fix RNA under in situ conditions in the deep continental biosphere and benchmarks a strategy for deep biosphere metatranscriptomic sequencing. This apparatus enabled the identification of active community members and the processes they carry out in this extremely oligotrophic environment. This work presents for the first time evidence of eukaryotic, archaeal, and bacterial...
Research Article | Applied and Environmental ScienceIdentifying and Predicting Novelty in Microbiome StudiesWe introduce two concepts to quantify the novelty of a microbiome. The first, the microbiome novelty score (MNS), allows identification of microbiomes that are especially different from what is already sequenced. The second, the microbiome attention score (MAS), allows identification of microbiomes that have many close neighbors, implying that considerable scientific attention is devoted to their study. By computing a microbiome focus...
Research Article | Applied and Environmental ScienceMembers of the Genus Methylobacter Are Inferred To Account for the Majority of Aerobic Methane Oxidation in Oxic Soils from a Freshwater WetlandHere we used soil metagenomics and metatranscriptomics to uncover novel members within the genus Methylobacter. We denote these closely related genomes as members of the lineage OWC Methylobacter. Despite the incredibly high microbial diversity in soils, here we present findings that unexpectedly showed that methane cycling was primarily mediated by a single genus for both methane production (“Candidatus...
- Research Article | Applied and Environmental ScienceEngineering Kluyveromyces marxianus as a Robust Synthetic Biology Platform Host
The yeast Kluyveromyces marxianus grows at high temperatures and on a wide range of carbon sources, making it a promising host for industrial biotechnology to produce renewable chemicals from plant biomass feedstocks. However, major genetic engineering limitations have kept this yeast from replacing the commonly used yeast...