Evolution: Spectral speciation.

Speciation is a complex process sparked by multitudes of environmental stressors and culminating in adaptive, and perhaps novel, phenotypic traits. A new study presents evidence supporting spectral niche-partitioning in a cyanobacterial clade specializing in far-red photosynthesis.

Taxonomic and functional restoration of tallgrass prairie soil microbial communities in comparison to remnant and agricultural soils.

Restoring ecosystems requires the re-establishment of diverse soil microbial communities that drive critical ecosystem functions. In grasslands, restoration and management require the application of disturbances like fire and grazing. Disturbances can shape microbial taxonomic composition and potentially functional composition as well.

Restoration age and reintroduced bison may shape soil bacterial communities in restored tallgrass prairies.

Knowledge of how habitat restoration shapes soil microbial communities often is limited despite their critical roles in ecosystem function. Soil community diversity and composition change after restoration, but the trajectory of these successional changes may be influenced by disturbances imposed for habitat management. We studied soil bacterial communities in a restored tallgrass prairie chronosequence for >6 years to document how diversity and composition changed with age, management through fire, and grazing by reintroduced bison, and in comparison to pre-restoration agricultural fields and remnant prairies.

Heterologous complementation systems verify the mosaic distribution of three distinct protoporphyrinogen IX oxidase in the cyanobacterial phylum.

The pathways for synthesizing tetrapyrroles, including heme and chlorophyll, are well-conserved among organisms, despite the divergence of several enzymes in these pathways. Protoporphyrinogen IX oxidase (PPOX), which catalyzes the last common step of the heme and chlorophyll biosynthesis pathways, is encoded by three phylogenetically-unrelated genes, hemY, hemG and hemJ. All three types of homologues are present in the cyanobacterial phylum, showing a mosaic phylogenetic distribution.

Discovery of Chlorophyll : Isolation and Characterization of a Far-Red Cyanobacterium from the Original Site of Manning and Strain (1943) at Moss Beach, California.

We have isolated a chlorophyll--containing cyanobacterium from the intertidal field site at Moss Beach, on the coast of Central California, USA, where Manning and Strain (1943) originally discovered this far-red chlorophyll. Here, we present the cyanobacterium's environmental description, culturing procedure, pigment composition, ultrastructure, and full genome sequence. Among cultures of far-red cyanobacteria obtained from red algae from the same site, this strain was an epiphyte on a brown macroalgae.