The vertebrate gut microbiota is a critical determinant of organismal function, yet it remains unclear if and how gut microbial communities affect host fitness under natural conditions. Here, we investigate associations between growth rate (a fitness proxy) and gut microbiota diversity and composition in a field experiment with threespine stickleback fish (Gasterosteus aculeatus). We detected on average 63% more bacterial taxa in the guts of high-fitness fish compared to low-fitness fish (i.e., higher -diversity), suggesting that higher diversity promotes host growth. The microbial communities of high-fitness fish had higher similarity (i.e., lower {beta}-diversity) than low-fitness fish, supporting the Anna Karenina principle-that there are fewer ways to have a functional microbiota than a dysfunctional microbiota. Our findings provide a basis for functional tests of the fitness consequences of host-microbiota interactions.

Decades of measurements of the thermophysical properties of hot metals show that pulsed Joule heating is an effective method to heat solid and liquid metals that are chemically reactive or difficult to contain. To extend such measurements to hundreds of GPa pressure, pulsed heating methods have recently been integrated with diamond anvil cells. The recent design used a low-side switch and active electrical sensing equipment that was prone to damage and measurement error. Here, we report the design and characterization of new electronics that use a high-side switch and robust, passive electrical sensing equipment. The new pulse amplifier can heat similar to 5 to 50 mu m diameter metal wires to thousands of kelvin at tens to hundreds of GPa using diamond anvil cells. Pulse durations and peak currents can each be varied over three orders of magnitude, from 5 mu s to 10 ms and from 0.2 to 200 A. The pulse amplifier is integrated with a current probe. Two voltage probes attached to the body of a diamond anvil cell are used to measure voltage in a four-point probe geometry. The accuracy of four-point probe resistance measurements for a dummy sample with 0.1 Omega resistance is typically better than 5% at all times from 2 mu s to 10 ms after the beginning of the pulse.

Brassinosteroid (BR) signaling leads to the nuclear accumulation of the BRASSINAZOLE-RESISTANT 1 (BZR1) transcription factor, which plays dual roles in activating or repressing the expression of thousands of genes. BZR1 represses gene expression by recruiting histone deacetylases, but how it activates transcription of BR -induced genes remains unclear. Here, we show that BR reshapes the genome-wide chromatin accessibility landscape, increasing the accessibility of BR -induced genes and reducing the accessibility of BR -repressed genes in Arabidopsis. BZR1 physically interacts with the BRAHMA -associated SWI/SNF (BAS) -chromatin -remodeling complex on the genome and selectively recruits the BAS complex to BR -activated genes. Depletion of BAS abrogates the capacities of BZR1 to increase chromatin accessibility, activate gene expression, and promote cell elongation without affecting BZR1's ability to reduce chromatin accessibility and expression of BR -repressed genes. Together, these data identify that BZR1 recruits the BAS complex to open chromatin and to mediate BR -induced transcriptional activation of growth -promoting genes.

Accretional heating of Earth's interior during formation is pivotal to its subsequent thermal and chemical evolution. In particular, impact heating of Earth's core is expected, but its amplitude and radial distribution within the core is unknown and could influence the onset of the geodynamo. The uncertainty is due, in part, to the lack of constraints on the temperature of the interior following formation due to the difficulty of preserving a record of such a high energy environment, and the assertion that super-heating during formation would be rapidly lost through magma ocean cooling. Here we systematically investigate core heating due to giant impacts using a Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) code with simulations spanning a range of impact angles, velocities, and masses. From these simulations we derive a scaling relation for core heating that depends on the impact parameters and predicts the radial core temperature profile following the impact. Our findings show that a significant amount of heat is deposited into the core, with a canonical impact scenario resulting in an average core temperature increase of about 3000 K, approximately 500 K higher than that of the overlying mantle. In this case the heat distribution within the core produces a strong thermal stratification. We use a parameterized cooling model to estimate that the core could have cooled to an adiabatic state similar to 290 Myr after a canonical impact, which is consistent with the observed time span between the age of the Moon and evidence for an active geodynamo.

Seismic and mineralogical studies have suggested regions at Earth's core-mantle boundary may be highly enriched in FeO, reported to exhibit metallic behavior at extreme pressure-temperature (P-T) conditions. However, underlying electronic processes in FeO remain poorly understood. Here we explore the electronic structure of B1-FeO at extreme conditions with large-scale theoretical modeling using state-of-the-art embedded dynamical mean field theory (eDMFT). Fine sampling of the phase diagram reveals that, instead of sharp metallization, compression of FeO at high temperatures induces a gradual orbitally selective insulator-metal transition. Specifically, at P-T conditions of the lower mantle, FeO exists in an intermediate quantum critical state, characteristic of strongly correlated electronic matter. Transport in this regime, distinct from insulating or metallic behavior, is marked by incoherent diffusion of electrons in the conducting t(2g) orbital and a band gap in the e(g) orbital, resulting in moderate electrical conductivity (similar to 10(5) S/m) with modest P-T dependence as observed in experiments. Enrichment of solid FeO can thus provide a unifying explanation for independent observations of low seismic velocities and elevated electrical conductivities in heterogeneities at Earth's mantle base.

Pathogens have evolved sophisticated mechanisms to manipulate host cell membrane dynamics, a crucial adaptation to survive in hostile environments shaped by innate immune responses. Plant-derived membrane interfaces, engulfing invasive hyphal projections of fungal and oomycete pathogens, are prominent junctures dictating infection outcomes. Understanding how pathogens transform these host-pathogen interfaces to their advantage remains a key biological question. Here, we identified a conserved effector, secreted by plant pathogenic oomycetes, that co-opts a host Rab GTPase-activating protein (RabGAP), TBC1D15L, to remodel the host-pathogen interface. The effector, PiE354, hijacks TBC1D15L as a susceptibility factor to usurp its GAP activity on Rab8a - a key Rab GTPase crucial for defense-related secretion. By hijacking TBC1D15L, PiE354 purges Rab8a from the plasma membrane, diverting Rab8a-mediated immune trafficking away from the pathogen interface. This mechanism signifies an uncanny evolutionary adaptation of a pathogen effector in co-opting a host regulatory component to subvert defense-related secretion, thereby providing unprecedented mechanistic insights into the reprogramming of host membrane dynamics by pathogens.

On Earth, microalgae contribute to about half of global net photosynthesis. During photosynthesis, sunlight is converted into chemical energy (ATP and NADPH) used by metabolism to convert CO2 into biomass. Alternative electron pathways of photosynthesis have been proposed to generate additional ATP that is required for sustaining CO2 fixation, but the relative importance of each pathway remains elusive. Here, we dissect and quantify the contribution of cyclic, pseudo-cyclic and chloroplast to mitochondria electron flows for their ability to sustain net photosynthesis in the microalga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii. We show that each pathway has the potential to energize substantial CO2 fixation, can compensate each other, and that the additional energy requirement to fix CO2 is more than 3 times higher than previous estimations. We further show that all pathways have very different efficiencies at energizing CO2 fixation, with the chloroplast- mitochondria interaction being the most efficient, thus laying bioenergetic foundations for biotechnological improvement of CO2 capture.

Phylogenetic placement refers to a family of tools and methods to analyze, visualize, and interpret the tsunami of metagenomic sequencing data generated by high-throughput sequencing. Compared to alternative (e. g., similarity-based) methods, it puts metabarcoding sequences into a phylogenetic context using a set of known reference sequences and taking evolutionary history into account. Thereby, one can increase the accuracy of metagenomic surveys and eliminate the requirement for having exact or close matches with existing sequence databases. Phylogenetic placement constitutes a valuable analysis tool per se, but also entails a plethora of downstream tools to interpret its results. A common use case is to analyze species communities obtained from metagenomic sequencing, for example via taxonomic assignment, diversity quantification, sample comparison, and identification of correlations with environmental variables. In this review, we provide an overview over the methods developed during the first 10 years. In particular, the goals of this review are 1) to motivate the usage of phylogenetic placement and illustrate some of its use cases, 2) to outline the full workflow, from raw sequences to publishable figures, including best practices, 3) to introduce the most common tools and methods and their capabilities, 4) to point out common placement pitfalls and misconceptions, 5) to showcase typical placement-based analyses, and how they can help to analyze, visualize, and interpret phylogenetic placement data.