Publications by authors named "D N Fairbanks"

Article Synopsis
  • Soil microbiomes are complex and varied communities of microbes, and large-scale metagenomic analysis is generating significant challenges in understanding their unique genetic makeups.
  • Advances in technology allow for the collection of extensive sequence data, but many soil samples still lack detailed characterization due to the sheer number of different taxa present.
  • Establishing publicly available databases of soil Meta-Genome Assembled Genomes (MAGs) could greatly enhance our understanding of soil microbiomes, facilitating research without the need for advanced computational skills or resources.
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Gregor Mendel is widely recognised as the founder of genetics. His experiments led him to devise an enduring theory, often distilled into what are now known as the principles of segregation and independent assortment. Although he clearly articulated these principles, his theory is considerably richer, encompassing the nature of fertilisation, the role of hybridisation in evolution, and aspects often considered as exceptions or extensions, such as pleiotropy, incomplete dominance, and epistasis.

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Mendel and Darwin were contemporaries, with much overlap in their scientifically productive years. Available evidence shows that Mendel knew much about Darwin, whereas Darwin knew nothing of Mendel. Because of the fragmentary nature of this evidence, published inferences regarding Mendel's views on Darwinian evolution are contradictory and enigmatic, with claims ranging from enthusiastic acceptance to outright rejection.

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Article Synopsis
  • Many bacterial and archaeal species in subsurface soils remain undescribed, complicating our understanding of these communities because existing studies mainly focus on surface soils.
  • Our research examined soil samples from 20 locations across the U.S. to analyze microbial diversity and community changes with depth, revealing a general decline in diversity and similarity to surface soil communities as depth increased.
  • We identified several phyla that increased in abundance with depth, particularly a candidate phylum with advantageous traits for low-nutrient environments, which highlights how these microbes adapt and remain significant in deeper soil ecosystems.
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Amaranth ( L.) is an emerging pseudocereal native to the New World that has garnered increased attention in recent years because of its nutritional quality, in particular its seed protein and more specifically its high levels of the essential amino acid lysine. It belongs to the Amaranthaceae family, is an ancient paleopolyploid that shows disomic inheritance (2 = 32), and has an estimated genome size of 466 Mb.

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