Lise Øvreås

TL;DR: Current evidence confirms that, as proposed by the Baas-Becking hypothesis, 'the environment selects' and is, in part, responsible for spatial variation in microbial diversity, but recent studies also dispute the idea that 'everything is everywhere'.

TL;DR: This review summarizes the recent progress in studies of soil microbial communities with focus on novel methods and approaches that provide new insight into the relationship between phylogenetic and functional diversity.

TL;DR: The community structure of bacterioplankton in meromictic Lake Saelenvannet was examined by PCR amplification of the V3 region of 16S rRNA from microbial communities recovered from various depths in the water column, and bacterial diversity estimated from the number and intensity of specific fragments in DGGE profiles decreased with depth, while the reverse was true for the Archaea.

TL;DR: There are probably millions of species in the microorganismal domains Bacteria and Archaea (the prokaryotes), and the authors are only just beginning to work out the basic principles governing their distribution and abundance in natural environments.

TL;DR: The bacterial and archaeal assemblages at two offshore sites located in polar and Mediterranean waters were studied and, although both deep-water samples had overall similarities, there were important differences that could be due to the warmer waters at depth of the Mediterranean Sea.