Publications by authors named "M Follows"
Meta-omics is commonly used for large-scale analyses of microbial eukaryotes, including species or taxonomic group distribution mapping, gene catalog construction, and inference on the functional roles and activities of microbial eukaryotes in situ. Here, we explore the potential pitfalls of common approaches to taxonomic annotation of protistan meta-omic datasets. We re-analyze three environmental datasets at three levels of taxonomic hierarchy in order to illustrate the crucial importance of database completeness and curation in enabling accurate environmental interpretation.
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- The study examines how the ratios of carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus (C:N:P) in ocean particulate matter differ from the standard Redfield Ratio, impacting global carbon storage as these particles sink into the deep ocean.
- Researchers found distinct latitudinal patterns in C:N:P ratios along a transect in the North Pacific, linking these patterns to the composition of macromolecules like proteins, carbohydrates, and lipids in oceanic particles.
- The findings suggest that changes in phytoplankton community structure and nutrient availability are key factors driving variations in these ratios, indicating that physiological acclimation to nutrient supply is likely responsible for the observed latitudinal trends.
Article Synopsis
- Marine microbial ecologists aim to measure organismal abundance and diversity in ecosystems at a high taxonomic resolution, using various methods to capture accurate data.
- Traditional flow cytometry estimates the number of microbial cells but lacks the ability to differentiate among many species, while amplicon sequencing offers detailed taxonomic data but often only provides relative abundances.
- This study introduces a technique that combines genomic internal standards with amplicon sequencing, allowing for accurate absolute cell counts of marine picocyanobacteria, which aligns closely with flow cytometry results, indicating a reliable method for analyzing microbial populations in complex marine environments.
Microbes transform their environments using diverse enzymatic reactions. However, it remains challenging to measure microbial reaction rates in natural environments. Despite advances in global quantification of enzyme abundances, the individual relationships between enzyme abundances and their reaction rates have not been systematically examined.
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