The Stanford University released this article written by Sandra Hines. It describes how species, from birds to butterflies and even to bacteria, appear to have a crucial role in the study of the relationships and interactions between living organisms and their natural or developed environment.In the two papers published in the journal Nature, each dealing with bacteria and microbial fungi respectively, shows that the quantity of the species including bacteria grows as the area that they occupy also enlarges. The findings implicate that this kind of relationship is defined by a universal law common to all species, states Claire Horner-Devine, one of the lead authors on the paper on bacteria and a research assistant professor at the University of Washington. This study received support from the American Association of University Women. Her co-authors are Brendan Bohannan, an assistant professor of biological sciences at Stanford, Jennifer Huges, a postdoctoral fellow in the Bohannan lab and an assistant professor at Brown University and Melissa Lage, a graduate student at Brown. Both studies were funded by the National Science Foundation.
In what they call a search for generalities, the researchers find the study especially challenging. Somehow, the hypothesis of the species-area relationship is really a general pattern and is evident in every kind and form of species, from birds to bacteria. Despite being small and mostly invisible to the naked eye, bacteria and fungi make up the majority of the species on earth. Bacteria and fungi have crucial roles to play and contribute to everything from composting dead plants, animals and other organic matter, to global climate change and even to the purification of water. For example, bacteria provide the nitrogen so vital for the plants that end up on our plates by decomposing organic matter. The fundamental perception of what bacteria and fungi do on earth and for the earth is key to a lot of researches and experiments being done in ecology.
The “species-area relationship” being described in this article already seems apparent to most scientists. The logic that the number of species increases in number as the area it lives in enlarges is a widely accepted hypothesis. However, researchers hoped that microbes could be different. So they used mathematical formulas already developed for deciphering how many plant and animal types or species can be expected to be contributed from samples taken far from each other, as opposed to samples taken near each other.
The scientists’ aim was to determine whether the composition of bacteria affects or influences its biological tasks. It is possible that bacteria taken from the salt marsh in Rhode Island, for example, may behave differently when it comes to how the bacteria buffers nitrogen pollution with a similar species of bacteria taken from a comparable marsh in San Francisco Bay. These researchers pioneered in the combination of ecological thinking with data about the microbes found with the use of just recently developed tools. The team carried out their analyses by contrasting DNA from bacteria samples taken half acre apart from a New England salt marsh. The article concludes that findings of the scientists reveal that just like plants and animals, micr
Read the entire article-http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2005/february2/microbe-020205.html
