The influence of male smoking on success rates after IVF/ICSI.

Objective: It has been established that male cigarette smoking has a negative effect on the semen quality and that it can induce DNA damage leading to worsening of reproductive outcomes. The aim of our large retrospective study is to determine the influence of male cigarette smoking on assisted reproduction, more specifically in IVF and ICSI outcomes.

Materials And Methods: Our study included all consecutive infertile couples (with a nonsmoking female partner) having their first IVF/ICSI cycle.

Remarkable fungal biodiversity on northern Belgium bats and hibernacula.

Bats can be affected by fungal pathogens such as , the causative agent of the white-nose syndrome. Their body surface can also be colonized by fungal commensals or carry transient fungal species and participate in their dispersal. In this study, 114 bat specimens belonging to seven species were sampled from various locations in northern Belgium.

The GEN-ERA toolbox: unified and reproducible workflows for research in microbial genomics.

Background: Microbial culture collections play a key role in taxonomy by studying the diversity of their strains and providing well-characterized biological material to the scientific community for fundamental and applied research. These microbial resource centers thus need to implement new standards in species delineation, including whole-genome sequencing and phylogenomics. In this context, the genomic needs of the Belgian Coordinated Collections of Microorganisms were studied, resulting in the GEN-ERA toolbox.

The taxonomy of the complex: a phylogenomic approach.

The medically relevant species complex has a variety of phenotypic presentations but shows relatively little genetic differences. Conventional barcodes, such as the internal transcribed spacer (ITS) region or the beta-tubulin gene, are not able to completely resolve the relationships between these closely related taxa. , and are currently accepted as separate species.