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Glacier-fed streams are the cold, ultra-oligotrophic, and unstable streams that are fed by glacial meltwater. Despite these extreme conditions, they harbour a diverse and abundant microbial diversity that develops into biofilms, covering the boulders and s ...
The arms race between viruses and their hosts shaped the evolutionary history and the genome composition of both parties. Restriction factors are the first-line antiviral effectors encoded by the host genomes and are often conserved through evolution to pr ...
Meromictic Lake Cadagno is a permanently stratified system with a persistent microbial bloom within the oxic-anoxic boundary called the chemocline. The association between oxygenic and anoxygenic photosynthesis within the chemocline has been known for at l ...
Arsenic (As) is simultaneously a ubiquitous and a toxic element. Arsenic is subject to bio-transformations catalyzed by microorganisms constituting the As biogeochemical cycle. The primordial Earth was devoid of oxygen, exposing life to the highly mobile a ...
Complete genomes can be recovered from metagenomes by assembling and binning DNA sequences into metagenome assembled genomes (MAGs). Yet, the presence of microdiversity can hamper the assembly and binning processes, possibly yielding chimeric, highly fragm ...
Over the last decade, genome-wide association studies led to major advances in identifying human genetic variants associated with infectious disease susceptibility. On the pathogen side, comparable methods are now applied to identify disease-modulating pat ...
Type I CRISPR-Cas systems typically rely on a two-step process to degrade DNA. First, an RNA-guided complex named Cascade identifies the complementary DNA target. The helicase-nuclease fusion enzyme Cas3 is then recruited in trans for processive DNA degrad ...
Many important questions in molecular biology, evolution, and biomedicine can be addressed by comparative genomic approaches. One of the basic tasks when comparing genomes is the definition of measures of similarity (or dissimilarity) between two genomes, ...
Virus inactivation mechanisms can be elucidated by methods which measure the loss of specific virus functionality (e.g., host attachment, genome internalization, genome replication). Genome functionality is frequently assessed by PCR-based methods, which a ...
Volume reduction (condensation) is a key for the practical usage of human urine as a fertilizer because it enables the saving of storage space and the reduction of transportation cost. However, concentrated urine may carry infectious disease risks resultin ...