Specificity in Arabidopsis thaliana recruitment of root fungal communities from soil and rhizosphere.

Biotic and abiotic conditions in soil pose major constraints on growth and reproductive success of plants. Fungi are important agents in plant soil interactions but the belowground mycobiota associated with plants remains poorly understood. We grew one genotype each from Sweden and Italy of the widely-studied plant model Arabidopsis thaliana.

Single cell genomics of deep ocean bacteria.

SAR11 is one of the most abundant bacterioplanktons in the upper surface waters of the oceans. In a recent issue of The ISME Journal, Thrash and colleagues present the genomes of four single SAR11 cells isolated from the deep oceans that are enriched in genes for membrane biosynthetic functions.

Single-cell genomics reveal low recombination frequencies in freshwater bacteria of the SAR11 clade.

Background: The SAR11 group of Alphaproteobacteria is highly abundant in the oceans. It contains a recently diverged freshwater clade, which offers the opportunity to compare adaptations to salt- and freshwaters in a monophyletic bacterial group. However, there are no cultivated members of the freshwater SAR11 group and no genomes have been sequenced yet.