Ruth A. Schmitz

TL;DR: Using the metagenome sequences to fully understand how complex microbial communities function and how microbes interact within these niches represents a major challenge for microbiologists today.

TL;DR: Findings might indicate that lateral gene transfer has played an important evolutionary role in forging the physiology of this metabolically versatile methanogen.

TL;DR: Environmental DNA libraries prepared from three different soil samples were screened for genes conferring lipolytic activity on Escherichia coli clones and revealed that one recombinant strain harbored a lipase and the other three contained esterases.

TL;DR: The sequence of the deduced orf6gene product harbors the fingerprint pattern of enoyl-coenzyme A hydratases/isomerases, and the other sequenced inserts of the plasmids recovered from the positive clones revealed no significant similarity to any other gene or gene product whose sequence is available in the National Center for Biotechnology Information databases.

TL;DR: If the findings can be extrapolated to other ocean basins, this suggests that the global marine N2-fixation rate derived from direct measurements may increase from 103 ± 8 Tg N yr−1 to 177‬±‬8‬‬2, and that the contribution of N2 fixers other than Trichodesmium is much more significant than was previously thought.