Dispersal limitations and historical factors determine the biogeography of specialized terrestrial protists.

Recent studies show that soil eukaryotic diversity is immense and dominated by micro-organisms. However, it is unclear to what extent the processes that shape the distribution of diversity in plants and animals also apply to micro-organisms. Major diversification events in multicellular organisms have often been attributed to long-term climatic and geological processes, but the impact of such processes on protist diversity has received much less attention as their distribution has often been believed to be largely cosmopolitan.

A review of European studies on pollination networks and pollen limitation, and a case study designed to fill in a gap.

Anthropogenic environmental change disrupts interactions between plants and their animal pollinators. To assess the importance of different drivers, baseline information is needed on interaction networks and plant reproductive success around the world. We conducted a systematic literature review to determine the state of our knowledge on plant-pollinator interactions and the ecosystem services they provide for European ecosystems.

Assessing agro-environmental performance of dairy farms in northwest Italy based on aggregated results from indicators.

Dairy farms control an important share of the agricultural area of Northern Italy. Zero grazing, large maize-cropped areas, high stocking densities, and high milk production make them intensive and prone to impact the environment. Currently, few published studies have proposed indicator sets able to describe the entire dairy farm system and their internal components.

Phosphorylation and hydrolysis of 7-deazaadenine nucleotides by rat liver and beef heart mitochondria.

Tubercidin nucleotides [tubercidin 5'-mono-phosphate (TuMP), 5'-diphosphate (TuDP), and 5'-triphosphate (TuTP)] were tested as potential substrates for the mitochondrial phosphotransferases from rat liver and beef heart. TuDP is recognized by the mitochondrial translocase and phosphorylated by the respiratory chain enzymes in both mitochondria and submitochondrial particles from rat liver and beef heart; the low transport rate of the analogue into the matrix space of the intact organelles seems to be not a limiting step in the formation of TuTP. The phosphorylation of TuDP is significantly lower in beef heart mitochondria because of a higher specificity for ADP of the heart oxidative phosphorylation system.

Enzymatic properties of 8-bromoadenine nucleotides.

8-Bromoadenine nucleotides were tested as potential substrates and/or inhibitors of mitochondrial processes in intact or disrupted organelles, as substrates of various phosphotransferases, and as allosteric effectors in the reactions catalyzed by phosphofructokinase, isocitrate dehydrogenase, glutamate dehydrogenase, and fructose-1,6-bisphosphatase. 8-BrATP and 8-BrADP are not recognized by the translocase system located in the inner mitochondrial membrane and cannot be used as usbstrates in oxidative phosphorylation and related reactions catalyzed be beef heart submitochondrial membranes. This confirms the high specificity for adenine nucleotides of the mammalian systems involved in energy-yielding and energy-requiring reactions.