Dissecting complex interactions between species and their environments has long been a research hot spot in the fields of ecology and evolutionary biology. The well-recognized Darwinian evolution has well-explained long-term adaptation scenarios; however, “rapid” processes of biological responses to environmental changes remain largely unexplored, particularly molecular mechanisms such as DNA methylation that have recently been proposed to play crucial roles in rapid environmental adaptation. Invasive species, which have capacities to successfully survive rapidly changing environments...

Land-cover change has long been recognized as having marked effect on the amount of soil organic carbon (SOC). However, the microbially-mediated processes and mechanisms on SOC are still unclear. In this study, the soil samples in a degenerative succession from alpine meadow to alpine steppe meadow in the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau were analyzed using high-throughput technologies, including Illumina sequencing and GeoChip functional gene arrays. The soil microbial community structure and diversity were significantly (P < 0.05)...

Hydrothermal vents and methane seeps are extreme deep-sea ecosystems that support dense populations of specialised macrobenthos such as mussels. But lack of genome information hinders understanding of the adaptation of these animals to such inhospitable environment. Here we report the genomes of a deep-sea vent/seep mussel Bathymodiolus platifrons and a shallow-water mussel Modiolus philippinarum. Phylogenetic analysis shows that these mussel species diverged approximately 110.4 million years ago. Many gene families, especially those for stabilising protein...