Chemosensory detection of polyamine metabolites guides to nutritive microbes.

Much is known about molecular mechanisms by which animals detect pathogenic microbes, but how animals sense beneficial microbes remains poorly understood. The roundworm is a microbivore that must distinguish nutritive microbes from pathogens. We characterized a neural circuit used by to rapidly discriminate between nutritive bacteria and pathogens.

Saturation of thylakoid-associated fatty acids facilitates bioenergetic coupling in a marine diatom allowing for thermal acclimation.

In a rapidly warming world, we ask, "What limits the potential of marine diatoms to acclimate to elevated temperatures?," a group of ecologically successful unicellular eukaryotic photoautotrophs that evolved in a cooler ocean and are critical to marine food webs. To this end, we examined thermal tolerance mechanisms related to photosynthesis in the sequenced and transformable model diatom Phaeodactylum tricornutum. Data from transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and fatty acid methyl ester-gas chromatography mass spectrometry (FAME-GCMS) suggest that saturating thylakoid-associated fatty acids allowed rapid (on the order of hours) thermal tolerance up to 28.