Philippa Kaur

Given the global role of microbes in the environment, determining the drivers of microbial community assembly is an important issue in microbial ecology17. Microbes inhabiting agricultural soils are closely linked to crop productivity through complex biogeochemical processes18. In this study, we investigated the major environmental factors that drive bacterial community assembly in maize soils across […] More

It has previously been shown in acute 24 h tests that small (50 to 60 nm) positively charged aminated polystyrene nanoparticles (PS-NH2) are the most toxic particles among the polystyrene nanoparticles tested on D. magna24. Therefore, 53 nm PS-NH2 nanoparticles were chosen in the present study to determine the lowest concentrations of nanoparticles observed causing mortality of D. […] More

1. Dirzo, R. et al. Defaunation in the Anthropocene. Science 345, 401–406 (2014). 2. IUCN. The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species Version 2019-1. IUCN Red List of Threatened Species https://www.iucnredlist.org/en (2019). 3. Bennett, P. M. & Owens, I. P. F. Variation in extinction risk among birds: chance or evolutionary predisposition? Proc. R. Soc. Lond. […] More

1. Butchart, S. H. M. et al. Science 328, 1164–1168 (2010). 2. Díaz, S. et al. Science 366, eaax3100 (2019). 3. Open-Ended Working Group on the Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework Zero-Order Draft of the Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework (Convention on Biological Diversity, 2020); https://go.nature.com/2wuuDYU 4. Adoption of the Paris Agreement Report No. FCCC/CP/2015/L.9/Rev.1 (UNFCCC, 2015); […] More

1. Shope, M. Sea Star Wasting. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 111, 6855 (2014). 2. Denner, E. B. M. et al. Aurantimonas coralicida gen. nov., sp. nov., the causative agent of white plague type II on Caribbean scleractinian corals. Int. J. Syst. Evol. Microbiol. 53, 1115–1122 (2003). 3. Croquer, A., Pauls, S. M. & Zubillaga, […] More

Phylogenetic diversity of NCLDV MAGs To address critical questions regarding the genomic diversity, evolutionary relationships, and virocell metabolism of NCLDVs in the environment, we developed a workflow to generate metagenome-assembled genomes (MAGs) of NCLDVs from publicly-available metagenomic data (see Methods, Supplementary Fig. 1). We surveyed 1545 metagenomes and generated 501 novel NCLDV MAGs from individual samples […] More

Hg isotopes in Late Archean sediments We studied sediments from the lower part of the Upper Nauga Formation, sampled from core GKF01 drilled by the Agouron Institute in the Griqualand West Basin, South Africa24 (SI, Supplementary Fig. 1). The core consists mainly of mudstones and dolostones deposited in a deep water slope environment of the Cambellrand-Malmani […] More

1. Foley, J. A. et al. Global consequences of land use. Science 309, 570–574 (2005). 2. Cardinale, B. J. et al. Biodiversity loss and its impact on humanity. Nature 486, 59–67 (2012). 3. Dobson, A. P., Bradshaw, A. D. & Baker, A. J. M. Hopes for the future: Restoration ecology and conservation biology. Science 277, […] More