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      A highly diverse, desert-like microbial biocenosis on solar panels in a Mediterranean city

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          Abstract

          Microorganisms colonize a wide range of natural and artificial environments although there are hardly any data on the microbial ecology of one the most widespread man-made extreme structures: solar panels. Here we show that solar panels in a Mediterranean city (Valencia, Spain) harbor a highly diverse microbial community with more than 500 different species per panel, most of which belong to drought-, heat- and radiation-adapted bacterial genera, and sun-irradiation adapted epiphytic fungi. The taxonomic and functional profiles of this microbial community and the characterization of selected culturable bacteria reveal the existence of a diverse mesophilic microbial community on the panels’ surface. This biocenosis proved to be more similar to the ones inhabiting deserts than to any human or urban microbial ecosystem. This unique microbial community shows different day/night proteomic profiles; it is dominated by reddish pigment- and sphingolipid-producers, and is adapted to withstand circadian cycles of high temperatures, desiccation and solar radiation.

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          Most cited references53

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          UCHIME improves sensitivity and speed of chimera detection

          Motivation: Chimeric DNA sequences often form during polymerase chain reaction amplification, especially when sequencing single regions (e.g. 16S rRNA or fungal Internal Transcribed Spacer) to assess diversity or compare populations. Undetected chimeras may be misinterpreted as novel species, causing inflated estimates of diversity and spurious inferences of differences between populations. Detection and removal of chimeras is therefore of critical importance in such experiments. Results: We describe UCHIME, a new program that detects chimeric sequences with two or more segments. UCHIME either uses a database of chimera-free sequences or detects chimeras de novo by exploiting abundance data. UCHIME has better sensitivity than ChimeraSlayer (previously the most sensitive database method), especially with short, noisy sequences. In testing on artificial bacterial communities with known composition, UCHIME de novo sensitivity is shown to be comparable to Perseus. UCHIME is >100× faster than Perseus and >1000× faster than ChimeraSlayer. Contact: robert@drive5.com Availability: Source, binaries and data: http://drive5.com/uchime. Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
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            tRNAscan-SE: a program for improved detection of transfer RNA genes in genomic sequence.

            We describe a program, tRNAscan-SE, which identifies 99-100% of transfer RNA genes in DNA sequence while giving less than one false positive per 15 gigabases. Two previously described tRNA detection programs are used as fast, first-pass prefilters to identify candidate tRNAs, which are then analyzed by a highly selective tRNA covariance model. This work represents a practical application of RNA covariance models, which are general, probabilistic secondary structure profiles based on stochastic context-free grammars. tRNAscan-SE searches at approximately 30 000 bp/s. Additional extensions to tRNAscan-SE detect unusual tRNA homologues such as selenocysteine tRNAs, tRNA-derived repetitive elements and tRNA pseudogenes.
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              GeneMarkS: a self-training method for prediction of gene starts in microbial genomes. Implications for finding sequence motifs in regulatory regions.

              J Besemer (2001)
              Improving the accuracy of prediction of gene starts is one of a few remaining open problems in computer prediction of prokaryotic genes. Its difficulty is caused by the absence of relatively strong sequence patterns identifying true translation initiation sites. In the current paper we show that the accuracy of gene start prediction can be improved by combining models of protein-coding and non-coding regions and models of regulatory sites near gene start within an iterative Hidden Markov model based algorithm. The new gene prediction method, called GeneMarkS, utilizes a non-supervised training procedure and can be used for a newly sequenced prokaryotic genome with no prior knowledge of any protein or rRNA genes. The GeneMarkS implementation uses an improved version of the gene finding program GeneMark.hmm, heuristic Markov models of coding and non-coding regions and the Gibbs sampling multiple alignment program. GeneMarkS predicted precisely 83.2% of the translation starts of GenBank annotated Bacillus subtilis genes and 94.4% of translation starts in an experimentally validated set of Escherichia coli genes. We have also observed that GeneMarkS detects prokaryotic genes, in terms of identifying open reading frames containing real genes, with an accuracy matching the level of the best currently used gene detection methods. Accurate translation start prediction, in addition to the refinement of protein sequence N-terminal data, provides the benefit of precise positioning of the sequence region situated upstream to a gene start. Therefore, sequence motifs related to transcription and translation regulatory sites can be revealed and analyzed with higher precision. These motifs were shown to possess a significant variability, the functional and evolutionary connections of which are discussed.
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                Author and article information

                Journal
                Sci Rep
                Sci Rep
                Scientific Reports
                Nature Publishing Group
                2045-2322
                05 July 2016
                2016
                : 6
                : 29235
                Affiliations
                [1 ]Institut Cavanilles de Biodiversitat i Biologia Evolutiva, Universitat de València , Paterna 46980, Spain
                [2 ]Darwin Bioprospecting Excellence, SL., Parc Cientific Universitat de València , Paterna, Valencia, Spain
                [3 ]Departament de Bioquímica i Biologia Molecular, Universitat de València , Burjassot 46100, Spain
                [4 ]Lifesequencing S.L., Parc Científic Universitat de València , Paterna, Spain
                [5 ]Biopolis S.L., Parc Cientific Universitat de València , Paterna, Valencia, Spain
                Author notes
                [*]

                Present address: Institute for Integrative Systems Biology (I2SysBio, Universitat de València-CSIC). Parc Cientific Universitat de València, Paterna, Valencia, Spain.

                [†]

                These authors contributed equally to this work.

                Article
                srep29235
                10.1038/srep29235
                4932501
                27378552
                2e7eb66e-d7a8-45e8-ba23-ee769a1cffbb
                Copyright © 2016, Macmillan Publishers Limited

                This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in the credit line; if the material is not included under the Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission from the license holder to reproduce the material. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

                History
                : 04 January 2016
                : 13 June 2016
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