A primary aim of microbial ecology is to determine patterns and drivers of community distribution, interaction, and assembly amidst complexity and uncertainty. Microbial community composition has been shown to change across gradients of environment, geographic distance, salinity, temperature, oxygen, nutrients, pH, day length, and biotic factors 1-6 . These patterns have been identified mostly by focusing on one sample type and region at a time, with insights extra polated across environments and geography to produce generalized principles. To assess how microbes are distributed across environments globally-or whether microbial community dynamics follow funda mental ecological 'laws' at a planetary scale-requires either a massive monolithic cross environment survey or a practical methodology for coordinating many independent surveys. New studies of microbial environments are rapidly accumulating; however, our ability to extract meaningful information from across datasets is outstripped by the rate of data generation. Previous meta analyses have suggested robust gen eral trends in community composition, including the importance of salinity 1 and animal association 2 . These findings, although derived from relatively small and uncontrolled sample sets, support the util ity of meta analysis to reveal basic patterns of microbial diversity and suggest that a scalable and accessible analytical framework is needed.The Earth Microbiome Project (EMP, http://www.earthmicrobiome. org) was founded in 2010 to sample the Earth's microbial communities at an unprecedented scale in order to advance our understanding of the organizing biogeographic principles that govern microbial commu nity structure 7,8 . We recognized that open and collaborative science, including scientific crowdsourcing and standardized methods 8 , would help to reduce technical variation among individual studies, which can overwhelm biological variation and make general trends difficult to detect 9 . Comprising around 100 studies, over half of which have yielded peer reviewed publications (Supplementary Table 1), the EMP has now dwarfed by 100 fold the sampling and sequencing depth of earlier meta analysis efforts 1,2 ; concurrently, powerful analysis tools have been developed, opening a new and larger window into the distri bution of microbial diversity on Earth. In establishing a scalable frame work to catalogue microbiota globally, we provide both a resource for the exploration of myriad questions and a starting point for the guided acquisition of new data to answer them. As an example of using this Our growing awareness of the microbial world's importance and diversity contrasts starkly with our limited understanding of its fundamental structure. Despite recent advances in DNA sequencing, a lack of standardized protocols and common analytical frameworks impedes comparisons among studies, hindering the development of global inferences about microbial life on Earth. Here we present a meta-analysis of microbial community samples collected by hundreds of r...

Hordeum bulbosum represents the secondary gene pool of barley and constitutes a potential source of various disease resistances in barley breeding. Interspecific crosses of H. vulgare x H. bulbosum resulted in recombinant diploid-barley progeny with immunity to BaMMV after mechanical inoculation. Tests on fields contaminated with different viruses demonstrated that resistance was effective against all European viruses of the soil-borne virus complex (BaMMV, BaYMV-1, -2). Genetic analysis revealed that resistance was dominantly inherited. Marker analysis in a F5 mapping family was performed to map the introgression in the barley genome and to estimate its size after several rounds of recombination. RFLP anchor-marker alleles indicative of an H. bulbosum introgression were found to cover an interval 2.9 cM in length on chromosome 6HS. The soil-borne virus resistance locus harboured by this introgressed segment was designated Rym14(Hb). For marker-assisted selection of Rym14(Hb) carriers, a diagnostic codominant STS marker was derived from an AFLP fragment amplified from leaf cDNA of homozygous-resistant genotypes inoculated with BaMMV.

Highlights d Thousands of diverse viruses encode genes that manipulate organic sulfur metabolism d Infection in the presence of sulfide increases bacteriophage production d Engineered phage T7 retains cysteine synthase (cysK) over multiple generations d These viruses can influence human gut dysbiosis, microbiomes, and biogeochemistry

Genetic analysis of resistance to leaf rust in rye (Puccinia recondita f. sp. secalis) led to the identification of two dominant resistance genes, Pr1 and Pr2. Both genes proved to be effective against a local leaf-rust population as well as a subset of single-pustule isolates (SPIs) the latter of which comprised SPIs with very high virulence complexity. Resistance conferred by Pr1 and Pr2 was expressed in detached-leaf tests of seedlings as well as in field tests of adult plants. Molecular marker analysis allowed us to map Pr1 in the proximal part of rye chromosome 6RL, whereas Pr2 was assigned to the distal part of chromosome 7RL. These results are discussed in view of homoeology relationships among Triticeae. A proposal is submitted for the designation of resistance genes to rye leaf rust which would avoid interference with existing gene-symboling in respect to wheat leaf-rust resistances introgressed from rye into wheat or triticale.