Teosinte in Europe - Searching for the Origin of a Novel Weed.

A novel weed has recently emerged, causing serious agronomic damage in one of the most important maize-growing regions of Western Europe, the Northern Provinces of Spain. The weed has morphological similarities to a wild relative of maize and has generally been referred to as teosinte. However, the identity, origin or genetic composition of 'Spanish teosinte' was unknown.

Sedimentary DNA Reveals Cyanobacterial Community Diversity over 200 Years in Two Perialpine Lakes.

Unlabelled: We reconstructed cyanobacterial community structure and phylogeny using DNA that was isolated from layers of stratified sediments spanning 200 years of lake history in the perialpine lakes Greifensee and Lake Zurich (Switzerland). Community analysis based on amplification and sequencing of a 400-nucleotide (nt)-long 16S rRNA fragment specific to Cyanobacteria revealed operational taxonomic units (OTUs) capturing the whole phylum, including representatives of a newly characterized clade termed Melainabacteria, which shares common ancestry with Cyanobacteria and has not been previously described in lakes. The reconstruction of cyanobacterial richness and phylogenetic structure was validated using a data set consisting of 40 years of pelagic microscopic counts from each lake.

Estimating bacterial diversity for ecological studies: methods, metrics, and assumptions.

Methods to estimate microbial diversity have developed rapidly in an effort to understand the distribution and diversity of microorganisms in natural environments. For bacterial communities, the 16S rRNA gene is the phylogenetic marker gene of choice, but most studies select only a specific region of the 16S rRNA to estimate bacterial diversity. Whereas biases derived from from DNA extraction, primer choice and PCR amplification are well documented, we here address how the choice of variable region can influence a wide range of standard ecological metrics, such as species richness, phylogenetic diversity, β-diversity and rank-abundance distributions.

De novo transcriptome hybrid assembly and validation in the European earwig (Dermaptera, Forficula auricularia).

Background: The European earwig (Forficula auricularia) is an established system for studies of sexual selection, social interactions and the evolution of parental care. Despite its scientific interest, little knowledge exists about the species at the genomic level, limiting the scope of molecular studies and expression analyses of genes of interest. To overcome these limitations, we sequenced and validated the transcriptome of the European earwig.

Identification of internal reference genes for gene expression normalization between the two sexes in dioecious white Campion.

Quantitative real time (qRT)-PCR is a precise and efficient method for studying gene expression changes between two states of interest, and is frequently used for validating interesting gene expression patterns in candidate genes initially identified in genome-wide expression analyses, such as RNA-seq experiments. For an adequate normalisation of qRT-PCR data, it is essential to have reference genes available whose expression intensities are constant among the different states of interest. In this study we present and validate a catalogue of traditional and newly identified reference genes that were selected from RNA-seq data from multiple individuals from the dioecious plant Silene latifolia with the aim of studying gene expression differences between the two sexes in both reproductive and vegetative tissues.