The Namib Desert in southwest Africa is hyperarid and composed of distinct microbial communities affected by a longitudinal aridity gradient. Here, we report four soil metaviromes from the Namib Desert, assessed using deep sequencing of metavirome libraries prepared from DNA extracted from gravel plain surface soils.
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1128/genomeA.01470-16 | DOI Listing |
Am J Bot
December 2024
Department of Biology, Duke University, Durham, NC, USA.
Premise: Southern Africa is a biodiversity hotspot rich in endemic plants and lichen-forming fungi. However, species-level data about lichen photobionts in this region are minimal. We focused on Trebouxia (Chlorophyta), the most common lichen photobiont, to understand how southern African species fit into the global biodiversity of this genus and are distributed across biomes and mycobiont partners.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Nematol
March 2024
Department of Biology, University of Richmond, Richmond, VA, 23173.
n. sp. was recovered and cultured from soils collected under (pencil-bush) in the Namib Desert of Namibia, one of the driest terrestrial habitats on Earth.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFLangmuir
September 2024
College of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering, Changchun University of Science and Technology, Changchun 130022, China.
Drawing inspiration from the microstructures on biological surfaces to create highly efficient water-collecting surfaces is an effective way to address water scarcity. Inspired by the role of the convex and concave grooves on the surface of Namib desert grass in promoting condensation, we show that optimizing the curvature radius improves the condensation rate of droplets. This convex-concave geometry, combined with nanoneedle structures on the groove ridges, facilitates droplet merging and self-removal through jumping, refreshing the condensation site and further enhancing condensation efficiency.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFACS Appl Mater Interfaces
August 2024
Ministry of Education Key Laboratory for the Green Preparation and Application of Functional Materials, Hubei University, Wuhan 430062, People's Republic of China.
Water scarcity is a global problem and collecting water from the air is a viable solution to this crisis. Inspired by Namib Desert beetle, leaf venation and spider silk, we designed an integrated biomimetic system with hybrid wettability and wettability gradient. The hybrid hydrophilic-hydrophobic wettability design that bionomics desert beetle's back can construct a three-dimensional topography with a water layer on the surface, expanding the contact area with the fog flow and thus improving the droplet trapping efficiency.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNature
August 2024
Aix Marseille Univ, CNRS, Avignon Université, IRD, IMBE, Aix-en-Provence, France.
Earth harbours an extraordinary plant phenotypic diversity that is at risk from ongoing global changes. However, it remains unknown how increasing aridity and livestock grazing pressure-two major drivers of global change-shape the trait covariation that underlies plant phenotypic diversity. Here we assessed how covariation among 20 chemical and morphological traits responds to aridity and grazing pressure within global drylands.
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