Background: Reproductive isolation can result from adaptive processes (e.g., ecological speciation and mutation-order speciation) or stochastic processes such as "system drift" model. Ecological speciation predicts barriers to gene flow between populations ...
Understanding macroevolutionary patterns is central to evolutionary biology. This involves the process of divergence within a species, which starts at the microevolutionary level, for instance, when two sub populations evolve towards different phenotypic o ...
Soil micro-organisms drive the global carbon and nutrient cycles that underlie essential ecosystem functions. Yet, we are only beginning to grasp the drivers of terrestrial microbial diversity and biogeography, which presents a substantial barrier to under ...
Uranium (U) contamination of ground and surface waters poses an acute hazard on the ecosystem and human health. Since the discovery of microbial U(VI) reduction, U bioremediation has been explored as a promising and cost-effective method compared to tradit ...
In recent years ionic liquids have emerged as an important class of compounds for the synthesis of metal nanoparticles. The significant advantage of using ionic liquids is their dual role of reaction solvent and nanoparticle stabilizer. The variability of ...
The quantities of natural organic matter (NOM) and associated iron (Fe) in soil extracts are known to increase with increasing extractant pH. However, it was unclear how the extraction pH affects Fe speciation for particles below 30 nm. We used flow field- ...
The hypothesis that the evolution of humans involves hybridization between diverged species has been actively debated in recent years. We present the following novel evidence in support of this hypothesis: the analysis of nuclear pseudogenes of mtDNA ("NUM ...
Over the past few years, engineered nanomaterials (ENMs) have penetrated nearly every sector of modern life and their broad-scale use is steadily and rapidly increasing. The (expected) elevated levels of ENMs in the environment raise concerns with regard t ...
With the advent of next-generation sequencing technologies, large data sets of several thousand loci from multiple conspecific individuals are available. Such data sets should make it possible to obtain accurate estimates of population genetic parameters, ...
Bio synthetic natural gas (Bio-SNG) is being proposed as an alternative to the natural gas of fossil origin (NG) [1]. Bio-SNG consists mainly of CH4 (at least 95%mol), has a high heating value (e.g. 10 kWh/m3N), and respects the quality standards of the NG ...