Project description:Despite the global importance of forests, it is virtually unknown how their soil microbial communities adapt at the phylogenetic and functional level to long term metal pollution. Studying twelve sites located along two distinct gradients of metal pollution in Southern Poland revealed that both community composition (via MiSeq Illumina sequencing of 16S rRNA genes) and functional gene potential (using GeoChip 4.2) were highly similar across the gradients despite drastically diverging metal contamination levels. Metal pollution level significantly impacted microbial community structure (p = 0.037), but not bacterial taxon richness. Metal pollution altered the relative abundance of specific bacterial taxa, including Acidobacteria, Actinobacteria, Bacteroidetes, Chloroflexi, Firmicutes, Planctomycetes and Proteobacteria. Also, a group of metal resistance genes showed significant correlations with metal concentrations in soil, although no clear impact of metal pollution levels on overall functional diversity and structure of microbial communities was observed. While screens of phylogenetic marker genes, such as 16S rRNA, provided only limited insight into resilience mechanisms, analysis of specific functional genes, e.g. involved in metal resistance, appeared to be a more promising strategy. This study showed that the effect of metal pollution on soil microbial communities was not straightforward, but could be filtered out from natural variation and habitat factors by multivariate statistical analysis and spatial sampling involving separate pollution gradients.
Project description:Despite the global importance of forests, it is virtually unknown how their soil microbial communities adapt at the phylogenetic and functional level to long term metal pollution. Studying twelve sites located along two distinct gradients of metal pollution in Southern Poland revealed that both community composition (via MiSeq Illumina sequencing of 16S rRNA genes) and functional gene potential (using GeoChip 4.2) were highly similar across the gradients despite drastically diverging metal contamination levels. Metal pollution level significantly impacted microbial community structure (p = 0.037), but not bacterial taxon richness. Metal pollution altered the relative abundance of specific bacterial taxa, including Acidobacteria, Actinobacteria, Bacteroidetes, Chloroflexi, Firmicutes, Planctomycetes and Proteobacteria. Also, a group of metal resistance genes showed significant correlations with metal concentrations in soil, although no clear impact of metal pollution levels on overall functional diversity and structure of microbial communities was observed. While screens of phylogenetic marker genes, such as 16S rRNA, provided only limited insight into resilience mechanisms, analysis of specific functional genes, e.g. involved in metal resistance, appeared to be a more promising strategy. This study showed that the effect of metal pollution on soil microbial communities was not straightforward, but could be filtered out from natural variation and habitat factors by multivariate statistical analysis and spatial sampling involving separate pollution gradients. 12 samples were collected from two long-term polluted areas (Olkusz and Miasteczko M-EM-^ZlM-DM-^Eskie) in Southern Poland. In the study presented here, a consecutively operated, well-defined cohort of 50 NSCLC cases, followed up more than five years, was used to acquire expression profiles of a total of 8,644 unique genes, leading to the successful construction of supervised
Project description:The role of the hippocampus in learning and memory has been widely studied. However, studies of differences along the longitudinal axis indicate that the hippocampus is perhaps not a singular structure, but instead it is thought that the dorsal and ventral poles of the hippocampus have functional differences. An anatomical gradient of hippocampal inputs along the dorsal-ventral axis supports this notion. It has been recently shown that there is transcriptional differentiation along the longitudinal axis of the adult hippocampus, coinciding with functional and anatomical gradients. Understanding the development of the dorsal-ventral hippocampal axis will further our understanding of the different hippocmapal functional contributions along the longitudinal axis. However, analysis of transcriptional gradients along the dorsal ventral axis have not been studied in the neonatal rat during development. We performed an extensive bead-chip based geneome-wide analysis of transcriptional differences in dorsal, intermediate, and ventral hippocampal tissue of rats aged postnatal day 0 (P0), P9, P18 and P60.
Project description:Chronic social isolation (CSIS) generates two stress-related phenotypes, resilience and susceptibility. Although brain energy metabolism is important in regulating social behaviors, the molecular mechanisms underlying CSIS resilience remain unclear. To identify protein changes and altered biochemical pathways and processes for resilience to CSIS, prefrontal cortical cytosolic proteomic profiling was performed comparing CSIS-resilient with CSIS-susceptible and control rats. Potential predictive proteins discriminating between the CSIS-resilient and CSIS-susceptible groups were identified by support vector machine-based sequential feature selection and random forest-based feature importance scores. Predominantly decreased levels of glycolytic enzymes, G protein-coupled receptor proteins, Ras subfamily of GTPase proteins, and antioxidant proteins were found in CSIS-resilient vs. CSIS-susceptible groups. Altered levels of Gapdh and proteins involved in microtubule and cytoskeletal organization, and calcium-binding proteins were identified between the two phenotypes. These dynamic changes were accompanied by increased levels of proteins involved in GABA synthesis, the proteasome system, nitrogen metabolism, and chaperone-mediated protein folding. The overall ratio of significantly up- and down-regulated cytosolic proteins suggests adaptive cellular alterations as part of the stress-coping process specific for the CSIS-resilient phenotype.