Rapid Response to Experimental Warming of a Microbial Community Inhabiting High Arctic Patterned Ground Soil.

The influence of climate change on microbial communities inhabiting the sparsely vegetated patterned ground soils that are widespread across the High Arctic is poorly understood. Here, in a four-year experiment on Svalbard, we warmed patterned ground soil with open top chambers and biannually irrigated the soil to predict the responses of its microbial community to rising temperatures and precipitation. A 1 °C rise in summertime soil temperature caused 44% and 78% increases in CO efflux and CH consumption, respectively, and a 32% increase in the frequency of bacterial 16S ribosomal RNA genes.

Surviving the cold: molecular analyses of insect cryoprotective dehydration in the Arctic springtail Megaphorura arctica (Tullberg).

Background: Insects provide tractable models for enhancing our understanding of the physiological and cellular processes that enable survival at extreme low temperatures. They possess three main strategies to survive the cold: freeze tolerance, freeze avoidance or cryoprotective dehydration, of which the latter method is exploited by our model species, the Arctic springtail Megaphorura arctica, formerly Onychiurus arcticus (Tullberg 1876). The physiological mechanisms underlying cryoprotective dehydration have been well characterised in M.

A novel gene encoding a coiled-coil mitochondrial protein located at the telomeric end of the human MHC Class III region.

The human Major Histocompatibility Complex (MHC) Class III region, which lies in between the MHC Class I and Class II regions on chromosome 6p21.3, contains approximately 60 genes with diverse functions. Using bioinformatics analyses, we identified a novel open reading frame (ORF) in this region, telomeric of BAT1, which we called Mitochondrial Coiled-Coil Domain 1 (MCCD1).