Publications by authors named "Naijia Xiao"
Article Synopsis
- Agricultural practices have altered land use and negatively impacted microbial communities essential for soil health, but their responses to these changes are not fully understood.!* -
- A study over 19 months revealed that conventionally tilled cropland, while reducing biodiversity, actually increased the complexity and stability of soil microbial networks compared to native tallgrass prairies.!* -
- The findings suggest that while agricultural disturbances can enhance the interactions among microbial species, this comes at the cost of overall biodiversity, highlighting a trade-off necessary for maintaining ecosystem functions in disturbed environments.!*
Our results reveal different responses of soil multifunctionality to increased and decreased precipitation. By linking microbial network properties to soil functions, we also show that network complexity and potentially competitive interactions are key drivers of soil multifunctionality.
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- Plant cell walls are resistant to breakdown, but adapted microbiomes can effectively deconstruct them, offering valuable microbial resources for biotechnology.
- Parallel microbiomes cultivated on sorghum showed different capabilities in biomass breakdown, with key microbial groups identified through gene expression dynamics.
- This study emphasizes that small variations in microbial community composition can lead to significant differences in performance, highlighting the role of cellulose-degrading Actinobacteria.
Article Synopsis
- Anthropogenic climate change is negatively affecting the functioning of ecosystems, particularly by threatening soil biodiversity.
- Over a 7-year study, researchers found that warming and reduced soil moisture significantly decrease the richness of soil bacterial, fungal, and protistan communities.
- The study highlights that decreased microbial biodiversity can harm essential ecosystem processes like productivity and biomass, suggesting a more serious impact in a warming climate.
Disentangling direct from indirect relationships in association networks.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A
January 2022
Networks are vital tools for understanding and modeling interactions in complex systems in science and engineering, and direct and indirect interactions are pervasive in all types of networks. However, quantitatively disentangling direct and indirect relationships in networks remains a formidable task. Here, we present a framework, called iDIRECT (Inference of Direct and Indirect Relationships with Effective Copula-based Transitivity), for quantitatively inferring direct dependencies in association networks.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAn amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWhile functional gene arrays (FGAs) have greatly expanded our understanding of complex microbial systems, specificity, sensitivity, and quantitation challenges remain. We developed a new generation of FGA, GeoChip 5.0, using the Agilent platform.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMicroorganisms in wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) are essential for water purification to protect public and environmental health. However, the diversity of microorganisms and the factors that control it are poorly understood. Using a systematic global-sampling effort, we analysed the 16S ribosomal RNA gene sequences from ~1,200 activated sludge samples taken from 269 WWTPs in 23 countries on 6 continents.
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