Stilianos Louca

TL;DR: It is found that environmental conditions strongly influence the distribution of functional groups in marine microbial communities by shaping metabolic niches, but only weakly influence taxonomic composition within individual functional groups.

TL;DR: Both patterns are unlikely to be the result of ecological drift, but are inevitable emergent properties of open microbial systems resulting mainly from biotic interactions and environmental and spatial processes.

TL;DR: It is found that regardless of the phylogenetic method tested, 16S GCNs could only be accurately predicted for a limited fraction of taxa, namely taxa with closely to moderately related representatives (≲15% divergence in the 16S rRNA gene) and all considered tools exhibit low predictive accuracy when evaluated against completely sequenced genomes.

TL;DR: It is found that all of the bromeliads exhibited remarkably similar functional community structures, but that the taxonomic composition within individual functional groups was highly variable, and that non-neutral processes at least partly shaped the composition within functional groups and were more important than spatial dispersal limitation and demographic drift.

TL;DR: A new R package, named ‘castor’, is presented, for comparative phylogenetics on large trees comprising millions of tips, which is often 100‐1000 times faster than existing tools.