A functional microbiome catalogue crowdsourced from North American rivers.

Predicting elemental cycles and maintaining water quality under increasing anthropogenic influence requires knowledge of the spatial drivers of river microbiomes. However, understanding of the core microbial processes governing river biogeochemistry is hindered by a lack of genome-resolved functional insights and sampling across multiple rivers. Here we used a community science effort to accelerate the sampling, sequencing and genome-resolved analyses of river microbiomes to create the Genome Resolved Open Watersheds database (GROWdb).

Microbial community storm dynamics signal sources of "old" stream water.

Accurate characterization of the movement of water through catchments, particularly during precipitation event response, is critical for hydrological efforts such as contaminant transport modeling or prediction of extreme flows. Abiotic hydrogeochemical tracers are commonly used to track sources and ages of surface waters but provide limited details about transit pathways or the spatial dynamics of water storage and release. Alternatively, biotic material in streams is derived from thousands of taxa originating from a variety of environments within watersheds, including groundwater, sediment, and upslope terrestrial environments, and this material can be characterized with genetic sequencing and bioinformatics.

Genomic evidence that microbial carbon degradation is dominated by iron redox metabolism in thawing permafrost.

Microorganisms drive many aspects of organic carbon cycling in thawing permafrost soils, but the compositional trajectory of the post-thaw microbiome and its metabolic activity remain uncertain, which limits our ability to predict permafrost-climate feedbacks in a warming world. Using quantitative metabarcoding and metagenomic sequencing, we determined relative and absolute changes in microbiome composition and functional gene abundance during thaw incubations of wet sedge tundra collected from northern Alaska, USA. Organic soils from the tundra active-layer (0-50 cm), transition-zone (50-70 cm), and permafrost (70+ cm) depths were incubated under reducing conditions at 4 °C for 30 days to mimic an extended thaw duration.

A functional microbiome catalog crowdsourced from North American rivers.

Predicting elemental cycles and maintaining water quality under increasing anthropogenic influence requires understanding the spatial drivers of river microbiomes. However, the unifying microbial processes governing river biogeochemistry are hindered by a lack of genome-resolved functional insights and sampling across multiple rivers. Here we employed a community science effort to accelerate the sampling, sequencing, and genome-resolved analyses of river microbiomes to create the Genome Resolved Open Watersheds database (GROWdb).

Nontarget Chemical Composition of Surface Waters May Reflect Ecosystem Processes More than Discrete Source Contributions.

We investigated environmental, landscape, and microbial factors that could structure the spatiotemporal variability in the nontarget chemical composition of four riverine systems in the Oregon Coast Range, USA. We hypothesized that the nontarget chemical composition in river water would be structured by broad-scale landscape gradients in each watershed. Instead, only a weak relationship existed between the nontarget chemical composition and land cover gradients.

The Roles of Microbes in Stream Restorations.

The goods and services provided by riverine systems are critical to humanity, and our reliance increases with our growing population and demands. As our activities expand, these systems continue to degrade throughout the world even as we try to restore them, and many efforts have not met expectations. One way to increase restoration effectiveness could be to explicitly design restorations to promote microbial communities, which are responsible for much of the organic matter breakdown, nutrient removal or transformation, pollutant removal, and biomass production in river ecosystems.

The Potential Role of Titanium Allergy in Implant Failure.

Implant bone loss and implant failure are growing concerns. In some cases, a possible factor leading to bone loss may be an allergy to titanium (Ti). In this report, the existing literature on Ti allergy as a factor in implant loss is reviewed, and the current views on its potential role in implant bone loss are discussed.

The streamwater microbiome encodes hydrologic data across scales.

Many fundamental questions in hydrology remain unanswered due to the limited information that can be extracted from existing data sources. Microbial communities constitute a novel type of environmental data, as they are comprised of many thousands of taxonomically and functionally diverse groups known to respond to both biotic and abiotic environmental factors. As such, these microscale communities reflect a range of macroscale conditions and characteristics, some of which also drive hydrologic regimes.

Prospective Study on PDL Anesthesia as an Aide to Decrease Palatal Infiltration Pain.

Objective: The purpose of this prospective randomized study was to assess using a periodontal ligament (PDL) injection as an aide to decrease palatal infiltration pain.

Methods: A total of 133 subjects randomly received a PDL injection and alternative palatal infiltration or a mock PDL injection and conventional palatal infiltration at 2 separate appointments. PDL injection was given in the mid-palatal sulcus of the maxillary first molar.

Experimental metatranscriptomics reveals the costs and benefits of dissolved organic matter photo-alteration for freshwater microbes.

Microbes and sunlight convert terrigenous dissolved organic matter (DOM) in surface waters to greenhouse gases. Prior studies show contrasting results about how biological and photochemical processes interact to contribute to the degradation of DOM. In this study, DOM leached from the organic layer of tundra soil was exposed to natural sunlight or kept in the dark, incubated in the dark with the natural microbial community, and analysed for gene expression and DOM chemical composition.

Clinical leadership development in Australian healthcare: a systematic review.

Despite clear priority and high costs of leadership capability programmes in healthcare, and significant investments into improving clinical leadership, there remains a prominent gap around evidence of effectiveness or impact on patient outcomes in Australia. We aimed to conduct a systematic review on postgraduate clinical leadership programmes to gather learnings on the processes, theoretical underpinnings, and impact of such programmes for medical and other health professionals. Our search included empirical, peer-reviewed evaluations of Australian clinical leadership development programmes published between November 2008 and March 2019 and yielded 3284 records.

Improving together: collaboration needs to start with regulators.

argue for a move away from top-down regulation to a new approach that facilitates rather than hinders learning across organisations

Patient Dignity: Exploring Oncology Nurses' Perceptions During End-of-Life Care.

Background: Research on nurses' perceptions of dignity is limited, with much work instead focusing on patients' experiences. Maintaining the dignity of patients is considered to be an important element of nursing care; however, it is often diminished by the acts and omissions of healthcare providers.

Objectives: The purposes of this study were to understand oncology nurses' perceptions of care that supports patients' dignity during end-of-life hospitalization and to propose a theoretical foundation consistent with these perceptions as a guide to practice.

Microbial Community Structure-Function Relationships in Yaquina Bay Estuary Reveal Spatially Distinct Carbon and Nitrogen Cycling Capacities.

Linking microbial community structure to ecological processes requires understanding of the functional roles among individual populations and the factors that influence their distributions. These structure-function relationships are particularly difficult to disentangle in estuaries, due to highly variable physico-chemical conditions. Yet, examining microbe-mediated turnover of resources in these "bioreactor" ecosystems is critical for understanding estuarine ecology.

Metatranscriptomics and Amplicon Sequencing Reveal Mutualisms in Seagrass Microbiomes.

Terrestrial plants benefit from many well-understood mutualistic relationships with root- and leaf-associated microbiomes, but relatively little is known about these relationships for seagrass and other aquatic plants. We used 16S rRNA gene amplicon sequencing and metatranscriptomics to assess potential mutualisms between microorganisms and the seagrasses and collected from mixed beds in Netarts Bay, OR, United States. The phylogenetic composition of leaf-, root-, and water column-associated bacterial communities were strikingly different, but these communities were not significantly different between plant species.

Assessment of Fecal Indicator Bacteria and Potential Pathogen Co-Occurrence at a Shellfish Growing Area.

Routine monitoring of shellfish growing waters for bacteria indicative of human sewage pollution reveals little about the bacterial communities that co-occur with these indicators. This study investigated the bacterial community, potential pathogens, and fecal indicator bacteria in 40 water samples from a shellfish growing area in the Chesapeake Bay, USA. Bacterial community composition was quantified with deep sequencing of 16S rRNA gene amplicons, and absolute gene abundances were estimated with an internal standard ( genomes).

Environmental Controls of Oyster-Pathogenic Vibrio spp. in Oregon Estuaries and a Shellfish Hatchery.

spp. have been a persistent concern for coastal bivalve hatcheries, which are vulnerable to environmental pathogens in the seawater used for rearing larvae, yet the biogeochemical drivers of oyster-pathogenic spp. in their planktonic state are poorly understood.

Assessment of the cerebellar neurotoxic effects of nicotine in prenatal alcohol exposure in rats.

The adverse effects of prenatal nicotine and alcohol exposure on human reproductive outcomes are a major scientific and public health concern. In the United States, substantial percentage of women (20-25%) of childbearing age currently smoke cigarettes and consume alcohol, and only a small percentage of these individuals quit after learning of their pregnancy. However, there are very few scientific reports on the effect of nicotine in prenatal alcohol exposure on the cerebellum of the offspring.

Ocean biogeochemistry modeled with emergent trait-based genomics.

Marine ecosystem models have advanced to incorporate metabolic pathways discovered with genomic sequencing, but direct comparisons between models and "omics" data are lacking. We developed a model that directly simulates metagenomes and metatranscriptomes for comparison with observations. Model microbes were randomly assigned genes for specialized functions, and communities of 68 species were simulated in the Atlantic Ocean.

Photochemical alteration of organic carbon draining permafrost soils shifts microbial metabolic pathways and stimulates respiration.

In sunlit waters, photochemical alteration of dissolved organic carbon (DOC) impacts the microbial respiration of DOC to CO. This coupled photochemical and biological degradation of DOC is especially critical for carbon budgets in the Arctic, where thawing permafrost soils increase opportunities for DOC oxidation to CO in surface waters, thereby reinforcing global warming. Here we show how and why sunlight exposure impacts microbial respiration of DOC draining permafrost soils.