User recommended papers

User-recommended papers allows you to suggest a paper you would like to see on Nature China. When these papers appear on our site, users may comment and vote on them. To recommend a paper please use this form. Please note that you cannot recommend a paper you have authored. The editors will reject any self-recommendations. All comments and recommendation are checked by the editors and may be edited prior to publication on the site.

  • Ecology & Evolution

    • No Detectable Maternal Effects of Elevated CO2 on Arabidopsis thaliana Over 15 Generations


      • Original article citation: PLoS ONE 4," e6035 ,

      • Categories: Ecology & Evolution and Earth & Environment
      • Recommended by : Yuhua Wang on 06/25/2009 02:47PM GMT

        The atmospheric CO2 concentration is projected to roughly double by the end of this century and the rising atmospheric CO2 concentration has appealed to many people and governments in the world. They wonder how future plants will respond to this global change. In response, many researchers have attempted to answer the question. Generally, they put current plants to elevated CO2 close to future atmospheric CO2 concentration and put forward the predictions based on experiment results within one generation of plants or a period of one generation. However, because plants may adapt to this global change in the long term, thus those predictions can be challenged. In order to solve this problem, the authors performed a fifteen-generation experiment to determine maternal effects of elevated CO2 plants over 5 years. The experiment design is very novel and original, and has never been reported previously. In addition, the results are very intriguing, suggesting that the maternal effects of elevated CO2 failed to extend to the offspring due to the potential lack of genetic variation for CO2 responsiveness, and future plants may not evolve specific adaptations to future elevated CO2. The results are contrast to many previous reports. Furthermore, the study provides a first experimental evidence to confirm the widely accepted assumption in many studies that plant responses to elevated CO2 observed within a single generation are similar to those observed over many generations. I do believe that the novel experimental design and interesting results will appeal scientific and popular readers, thus I recommend this article.
      • Comment on this subject: 1 comment made

    • Climate change, land use change, and China’s food security in the twenty-first century: an integrated perspective


      • Original article citation: Climatic Change 93," 433 - 445, (2009).

      • Categories: Earth & Environment, Ecology & Evolution, and Materials
      • Recommended by : Jinwei Dong on 06/05/2009 11:50AM GMT

        Food security of China is always a principal problem for China even the whole world. And substantive studies have focused on the topic because of the challenges from loss of cropland, population growth, and water shortages. However, existed studies have generally failed to comprehensively consider future scenarios concluding climate change, land use, socioeconomic and technological scenarios. The paper provided an integrated perspective on China’s food demand and supply in future based on all the data from the aspects of land, population, climate and socioeconomic scenarios. The results provided effective and valuable conclusions for decision making of the government and future researches.
      • Comment on this subject: 2 comments made

    • An uncultivated crenarchaeota contains functional bacteriochlorophyll a synthase


      • Original article citation: ISME J doi:10.1038/ismej.2008.85 (2008)

      • Categories: Ecology & Evolution, Cell & Molecular Biology, and Earth & Environment
      • Recommended by : Alison Wrigley on 11/06/2008 02:52PM GMT

        A fosmid clone 37F10 containing an archaeal 16S rRNA gene was screened out from a metagenomic library of Pearl River sediment, southern China. Sequence analysis of the 35 kb inserted fragment of 37F10 found that it contains a single 16S rRNA gene belonging to Miscellaneous Crenarchaeotal Group (MCG) and 36 open reading frames (ORFs). One ORF (orf11) encodes putative bacteriochlorophyll a synthase (bchG) gene. Bacteriochlorophyll a synthase gene has never been reported in a member of the domain Archaea, in accordance with the fact that no (bacterio)-chlorophyll has ever been detected in any cultivated archaea. The putative archaeal bchG (named as ar-bchG) was cloned and heterologously expressed in Escherichia coli. The protein was found to be capable of synthesizing bacteriochlorophyll a by esterification of bacteriochlorophyllide a with phytyl diphosphate or geranylgeranyl diphosphate. Furthermore, phylogenetic analysis clearly indicates that the ar-bchG diverges before the bacterial bchGs. Our results for the first time demonstrate that a key and functional enzyme for bacteriochlorophyll a biosynthesis does exist in Archaea.
      • Comment on this subject: 0 comments made

    • Chloroplast phylogeography of Dipentodon (Dipentodontaceae) in southwest China and northern Vietnam

      • QING-JUN YUAN, ZHI-YONG ZHANG, HUA PENG, SONG GE
        Original article citation: Mol Ecol 17," 1054 - 1065, (2008).

      • Categories: Ecology & Evolution, Genetics, and Cell & Molecular Biology
      • Recommended by : zhang xuemei on 04/12/2008 02:13AM GMT

        This is an excellent and meaningful papar involving the conceivably most complicated evolutionary history in the southeast Tibetan Plateau,where the topography and climate are extremely complex. The incumbent target is also an attractive monotypic genus Dipentodon sinicus. By using chloroplast sequences, important results were obtained providing new insights to the evolution of biodiversity on the Tibetan Plateau and adiacent areas. Also, a historical framework for the conservation of biodiversity in this area was given. In summary, it is an informative and helpful paper for understanding the Dipentodon and Tibetan Plateau.
      • Comment on this subject: 0 comments made

    • Differences in soil bacterial diversity: driven by contemporary disturbances or historical contingencies?

      • Yuan Ge, Ji-zheng He, Yong-guan Zhu, Jia-bao Zhang, Zhihong Xu, Li-mei Zhang, Yuan-ming Zheng
        Original article citation: ISME J doi:10.1038/ismej.2008.2 (2008)

      • Categories: Ecology & Evolution, Earth & Environment, and Cell & Molecular Biology
      • Recommended by : James Moir on 02/14/2008 09:54PM GMT

        It is an open debate in microbial ecology that if there is any distribution pattern for soil microbial diversity. Professor Ji-Zheng He and colleagues from the Chinese Academy of Sciences provided strong evidence that the bacterial diversity variation is mainly controlled by the soil historical contingencies across a regional scale (1000 km), while contemporary disturbances contribute much less variations of the bacterial diversity, according to their paper published in The ISME Journal by the Nature Publishing Group (published online 31 January 2008). They used a large set of manipulated field-based molecular data and advanced statistical analyses to elucidate quantitatively the contributions of the historical contingencies and the contemporary disturbances to the variations of soil bacterial diversity. This study is the first quantitative examination of the relative importance of contemporary disturbances (~20%) and historical contingencies (~60%) in influencing large-scale soil bacterial diversity. Moreover, this paper showed an important approach for accessing soil microbial biogeography by using latest molecular techniques, advanced statistical analyses and ecological theories. The findings of this study indicated that there are some aspects of biogeography that might be common to all life, which would extend our understanding of the biogeography of organisms.
      • Comment on this subject: 5 comments made

    • Quantitative analyses of the abundance and composition of ammonia-oxidizing bacteria and ammonia-oxidizing archaea of a Chinese upland red soil under long-term fertilization practices

      • Ji-zheng He, Ju-pei Shen, Li-mei Zhang, Yong-guan Zhu, Yuan-ming Zheng, Ming-gang Xu, Hongjie Di
        Original article citation: Environ Microbiol 9," 2364 - 2374, (2007).

      • Categories: Ecology & Evolution, Earth & Environment, and Cell & Molecular Biology
      • Recommended by : James Moir on 01/18/2008 03:59AM GMT

        Nitrification, the process of conversion of ammonium to nitrate in the soil is a microbial process which is fundamentally important for nitrogen cycling in the terrestrial ecosystem. It also has environmental and economic implications as the process produces nitrate which can be leached and contaminate groundwater and surface waters. The leaching of nitrate also reduces the efficiency of nitrogen for plant growth. However, the microbes involved in performing the nitrification process are poorly understood mainly because of difficulties of studying them using conventional techniques. The latest advances in molecular techniques and real-time PCR have provided new approaches to studying the abundance and diversity of these microbes. To this end, the publication of the paper by Jizheng He et al., titled, Quantitative analyses of the abundance and composition of ammonia-oxidizing bacteria and ammonia-oxidizing archaea of a Chinese upland red soil under long-term fertilization practices Published in Environmental Microbiology (2007) 9(9): 2364-2374 represents a major milestone in this area using the latest molecular techniques to study these ammonium oxidizing microbes. This work makes major advances in this subject area by providing quantitative information on the relative abundance and diversity of the ammonium oxidizing bacteria and archaea in soils that had been under long-term fertilizer applications. These research findings provide important insights into the role that these different microbes play in nitrification and the impact of human activities on the population abundance and diversity of these microbes. These findings have implications on the sustainable management of terrestrial ecosystems. I therefore would strongly recommend the paper for the website of Nature China as I am confident that many researchers around China and the world would find it an interesting and important paper.
      • Comment on this subject: 4 comments made

    • Bats respond to polarity of a magnetic field

      • Yinan Wang, Yongxin Pan, Stuart Parsons, Michael Walker, Shuyi Zhang
        Original article citation: Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 274," (2007).

      • Categories: Ecology & Evolution and Neuroscience
      • Recommended by : Jianlan Song on 11/06/2007 09:11AM GMT

        It offers some insights into the relationship between the type of magnetic sense and evolution. Not for this paper, we might believe that mammals and birds use the same type of magnetic sense, which is based on the inclination instead of polarity, to judge the relative direction of the poles and Equator.
      • Comment on this subject: 1 comment made

    • Insights into the Evolution of the Motilin/Ghrelin-Associated Family and Their Receptors

      • J. He, D. M. Irwin, Y.-p. Zhang
        Original article citation: Molecular Biology and Evolution doi:10.1093/molbev/msm161 (2007)

      • Categories: Ecology & Evolution, Genetics, Neuroscience, and Cell & Molecular Biology
      • Recommended by : yongyi shen on 09/14/2007 07:21AM GMT

        According to Darwinian theory, complexity evolves by a stepwise process of elaboration and optimization under natural selection. Simultaneous emergence of more than one element by mutational processes is unlikely, so this would evoke an evolutionary puzzle that how evolutionary processes assemble complex systems that depend on specific interactions among the parts. Based on phylogenetic analyses and molecular inferences, He et al. investigated the evolution of the motilin/ghrelin-associated family and their receptors, and demonstrated that the ghrelin/GHSR system has been maintained and functionally conserved from fish to mammals, whereas motilin-MLNR specificity only evolved as the result of ligand-receptor coevolution after the hormone gene duplicated. Discordance of evolutionary histories for the receptors and ligands indicates that tightly integrated systems can be assembled by combining old molecules that were previously constrained with different ancestral roles, with new ones (generated by gene duplication that represents slight structural variants of an older element). Then they proposed a model for the evolution of novelties in tightly integrated biological systems, which may provide a general explanation for how the molecular interactions critical for life’s complexity emerged in Darwinian fashion after gene duplication.
      • Comment on this subject: 0 comments made
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