Microalgal assemblages response to water quality remediation in coastal waters of Perth, Australia.

Nutrient reduction is an essential environmental policy for water quality remediation, but climate change can offset the ecological benefits of nutrient reduction and lead to the difficulty of environmental evaluation. Here, based on the records of three lipid microalgal biomarkers and stable isotopes of carbon and nitrogen in two sediment cores from the embayment of Perth, Australia, we reconstructed the microalgal biomasses (diatoms, dinoflagellates and coccolithophores) over the past century and evaluated the ecological effects of nutrient reduction on them, using Change Point Modeling (CPM) and redundancy analysis (RDA). The CPM result showed that total microalgal biomarkers increased by 25% and 51% in deep and shallow areas, respectively, due to nutrient enrichment caused by industrial wastewater in the 1950s and the causeway construction in the 1970s, and dinoflagellates were beneficiaries of eutrophication.

Sources and radiocarbon ages of aerosol organic carbon along the east coast of China and implications for atmospheric fossil carbon contributions to China marginal seas.

Aerosol deposition is an important mechanism for the delivery of terrestrial organic carbon (OC) to marginal seas, but OC age characteristics of aerosols are not well constrained and their contributions to sediment OC burial have not been quantified. Total suspended particle samples were collected along the east coast of China at Changdao (CD), Qingdao (QD) and Huaniao Island (HNI), and were analyzed for total organic carbon (TOC) isotopes (C and C) in order to bridge this information gap. TOC δC and ΔC values ranged from -23.

Paleoecological evidence for decadal increase in phytoplankton biomass off northwestern Australia in response to climate change.

Ocean warming can modify the phytoplankton biomass on decadal scales. Significant increases in sea surface temperature (SST) and rainfall in the northwest of Australia over recent decades are attributed to climate change. Here, we used four biomarker proxies (TEX index, long-chain -alkanes, brassicasterol, and dinosterol) to reconstruct approximately 60-year variations of SST, terrestrial input, and diatom and dinoflagellate biomass in the coastal waters of the remote Kimberley region.

The cellular robustness by genetic redundancy in budding yeast.

The frequent dispensability of duplicated genes in budding yeast is heralded as a hallmark of genetic robustness contributed by genetic redundancy. However, theoretical predictions suggest such backup by redundancy is evolutionarily unstable, and the extent of genetic robustness contributed from redundancy remains controversial. It is anticipated that, to achieve mutual buffering, the duplicated paralogs must at least share some functional overlap.

Evidences for increased expression variation of duplicate genes in budding yeast: from cis- to trans-regulation effects.

Duplicate genes tend to have a more variable expression program than singleton genes, which was thought to be an important way for the organism to respond and adapt to fluctuating environment. However, the underlying molecular mechanisms driving such expression variation remain largely unexplored. In this work, we first rigorously confirmed that duplicate genes indeed have higher gene expression variation than singleton genes in several aspects, i.

Revisiting the contribution of cis-elements to expression divergence between duplicated genes: the role of chromatin structure.

Although divergence in expression is thought to be a hallmark of functional dispersal between paralogs postduplication, there is currently a limited understanding of the mechanisms underlying the necessary transcriptional alterations as recent studies have suggested that only a very small proportion of expression variation could be explained by transcriptional variation between paralogs. To further this understanding, we examined comprehensively curated regulatory interactions and genomewide nucleosome occupancy in budding yeast to specifically determine the contribution of cis-elements to expression divergence between extant duplicates. We found that divergence in activation by transcription factors plays a more important role in expression divergence of paralogs than previously appreciated; further, analysis of promoter chromatin structure demonstrated that differential nucleosome organization is coupled with divergent expression of paralogs.

PhosSNP for systematic analysis of genetic polymorphisms that influence protein phosphorylation.

We are entering the era of personalized genomics as breakthroughs in sequencing technology have made it possible to sequence or genotype an individual person in an efficient and accurate manner. Preliminary results from HapMap and other similar projects have revealed the existence of tremendous genetic variations among world populations and among individuals. It is important to delineate the functional implication of such variations, i.