Arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi equalize differences in plant fitness and facilitate plant species coexistence through niche differentiation.

Mycorrhizal fungi are essential to the establishment of the vast majority of plant species but are often conceptualized with contradictory roles in plant community assembly. On the one hand, host-specific mycorrhizal fungi may allow a plant to be competitively dominant by enhancing growth. On the other hand, host-specific mycorrhizal fungi with different functional capabilities may increase nutrient niche partitioning, allowing plant species to coexist.

Links across ecological scales: Plant biomass responses to elevated CO.

The degree to which elevated CO concentrations (e[CO ]) increase the amount of carbon (C) assimilated by vegetation plays a key role in climate change. However, due to the short-term nature of CO enrichment experiments and the lack of reconciliation between different ecological scales, the effect of e[CO ] on plant biomass stocks remains a major uncertainty in future climate projections. Here, we review the effect of e[CO ] on plant biomass across multiple levels of ecological organization, scaling from physiological responses to changes in population-, community-, ecosystem-, and global-scale dynamics.

Effect of hybridization composition and glycerin content on novel corn starch/nata de coco plastic film: Thermal, mechanical, and degradation study.

The objective of this work was to develop a plastic film from food sources with excellent thermal, mechanical, and degradability performance. Corn starch (CS)/nata de coco (NDC) were hybridized with addition of glycerin as plasticizer at different weight ratio and weight percent, respectively. Sample analysis found that the hybridization of CS with NDC improved the film forming properties, mechanical and thermal, degradation properties, as well as hydrophobicity and solubility of the film up to 0.

Resource-ratio theory predicts mycorrhizal control of litter decomposition.

Ecosystems with ectomycorrhizal plants have high soil carbon : nitrogen ratios, but it is not clear why. The Gadgil effect, where competition between ectomycorrhizal and saprotrophic fungi for nitrogen slows litter decomposition, may increase soil carbon. However, experimental evidence for the Gadgil effect is equivocal.

DISCOVERING PATIENT PHENOTYPES USING GENERALIZED LOW RANK MODELS.

The practice of medicine is predicated on discovering commonalities or distinguishing characteristics among patients to inform corresponding treatment. Given a patient grouping (hereafter referred to as a phenotype), clinicians can implement a treatment pathway accounting for the underlying cause of disease in that phenotype. Traditionally, phenotypes have been discovered by intuition, experience in practice, and advancements in basic science, but these approaches are often heuristic, labor intensive, and can take decades to produce actionable knowledge.