Thomas Bell

TL;DR: Results indicate that Alyssum lesbiacum might be effective in phytoextracting nickel from marginally PAH-contaminated soils and provide evidence for the broader applicability of histidine for quantifying and predicting Ni phy toavailability in soils.

TL;DR: It is shown that while the use of test statistics and the R2 gives contradictory assessments, the variance components analysis reveals that species richness and composition are of roughly similar importance for primary productivity in grassland biodiversity experiments.

TL;DR: An experiment that takes advantage of the rapid evolutionary response of bacteria to disentangle the role of phylogenetic and species diversity finds that the relationship between phylogenetic diversity and productivity is strong for the ancestral lineages but brakes down for the evolved lineages.

TL;DR: This case study shows that pesticides can affect food-web structure and ecosystem functioning, both directly and indirectly across levels of biological organisation and demonstrates how an integrated assessment approach can elucidate links between microbiota, macroinvertebrates and fish, for instance, thus improving the understanding of the range of biological consequences of chemical contamination in natural ecosystems.

TL;DR: It is hypothesized that the basic chemical composition of diet fundamentally selects for specific intestinal microbiota which may help explain disparate disease outcome and therapeutic direction and lead to specific strategies to alter microbial behavior to improve clinical outcome.