Soil food webs of the McMurdo Dry Valleys, Antarctica are simple. These include primary trophic levels of mosses, algae, cyanobacteria, bacteria, archaea, and fungi, and their protozoan and metazoan consumers (including relatively few species of nematodes, tardigrades, rotifers, and microarthropods). These biota are patchily distributed across the landscape, with greatest faunal biodiversity associated with wet soil. Understanding trophic structure is critical to studies of biotic interactions and distribution; yet, McMurdo Dry Valley soil food web structure has been inferred from limited laboratory culturing and micro- scopic observations. To address this, we measured stable isotope natural abundance ratios of C (13C/12C) and N (15N/14N) for di erent metazoan taxa (using whole body biomass) to determine soil food web structure in Taylor Valley, Antarctica. Nitrogen isotopes were most useful in di erentiating trophic levels because they fractionated predictably at higher trophic levels. Using ...

Global climate change will affect fish sizes in unpredictable ways and, consequently, impact complex food webs in our oceans, a new IMAS-led study has shown.

In this paper, we prove the existence of a limit cycle for a given system of differential equations corresponding to an asymmetrical intraguild food web model with functional responses Holling type II for the middle and top predators and logistic grow for the (common) prey. The existence of such limit cycle is guaranteed, via the first Lyapunov coefficient and the Andronov-Hopf bifurcation theorem, under certain conditions for the parameters involved in the system.

Abstract. The significant impact of dust deposition on heterotrophic bacterial dynamics in the surface oligotrophic ocean has recently been evidenced. Considering the central role of bacteria in the microbial loop, it is likely that dust deposition also affects the structure and the functioning of the whole microbial food web. In the frame of the DUNE project, aiming to estimate the impact of dust deposition on the oligotrophic Mediterranean Sea through mesocosm experiments, the main goal of the present paper was to assess how two successive dust deposition events affect the dynamics of the microbial food web. The first dust seeding delivered new P and N to the amended mesocosms and resulted in a pronounced stimulation of bacterial respiration. It also induced pronounced, but transient, changes in the bacterial community composition. No significant effects were observed on the abundances of viruses and heterotrophic nanoflagellates. The second dust seeding also delivered new P and N to the ...

The grazing food chain is one of the major types of food chain that is seen as a food chain process dominantly occurring in organisms. The grazing food chain starts from the autotrophs (green plants), the major energy for this chain is taken from the sun as the plants carry out the process of photosynthesis in the presence of sunlight. The green plants work as the primary producer of this type of food chain; later the herbivores get fed upon the green plants. The chain goes on further as the primary consumers (herbivores) are eaten by the secondary consumers (omnivores) in this type of food chain. This food chain doesnt consist of microbes or other decomposers; it is carried out by the macroscopic organisms. The grazing food chain is the simpler type of food chain as it begins from the primary producers (green plants), who are the dominant producers in different ecosystems across the globe. The name of the food chain itself tells that it possess the green plants as a major source or the one ...

Web structures comprising a tuft and methods for making same are provided. More particularly, web structures comprising a polymeric structure comprising a crosslinked, hydroxyl polymer, wherein the web structure comprises a tuft and processes for making such web structures are provided.

Full publication list available from Google scholar and see my profile on Research Gate. Selected key publications: Ruiter, P. C. de, and U. Gaedke (2017) Emergent facilitation promotes biological diversity in pelagic food webs. Food Webs (in press). Coutinho, R., T. Klauschies, and U. Gaedke (2016) Bimodal trait distributions with large variances question the reliability of trait-based aggregate models. Theoretical Ecology, 6: 4141-4159 DOI 10.1007/s12080-016-0297-9. Klauschies, T., D. A. Vasseur, and U. Gaedke (2016) Trait adaptation promotes species coexistence in diverse predator and prey communities. Ecology and Evolution, 9: 389-408 DOI: 10.1002/ece3.2172. Boit, A., N.D. Martinez, R. J. Williams, U. Gaedke (2012) Mechanistic theory and modeling of complex food web dynamics in Lake Constance. Ecol. Lett., 15:594-602 Massie, T. M., B. Blasius, G. Weithoff, U. Gaedke, and G. Fussmann (2010) Cycles, phase synchronization and entrainment in single-species phytoplankton populations. Proc. Nat. ...

Reason: Some of the organisms are of Omnivores in nature. Some of the worksheets below are Free Food Chain Worksheets, definition of Food Chains and Food Webs, Classify organisms by their roles in the food chain, Mans impact on food chains, Food chain quiz, … Once you find your worksheet(s), you can either click on the pop-out icon or download button to print or download your desired worksheet(s). This means that when we eat the meat from the cow, were at the tertiary level or higher. way up to the top of the food chain. 17. called the producers, and they get their energy directly from sunlight and inorganic nutrients. The size of a food chain can vary, yet there is a limit to the number of levels that a food chain can reach. View All. The consumer-resource system is another name for a food web. As you probably know, Choose three (3) food chains. About 50% of the energy (possibly as much as 90%) in food is lost at each trophic level when Related Video. Most food chains consist of three or ...

This PhD deals with spatial and temporal community patterns in Barents Sea marine food webs and benthic communities in Svalbard. A main aim of this PhD project has been to study how community and food-web structure changes along environmental and climatic gradients, and to elucidate how species respond to climate warming in the Arctic. We used network analysis to study how the network of who eats whom in the Barents Sea changes from the boreal, warm-water regions in the southwest to the cold-water, arctic regions in the northeast. We documented differences in the food-web structure across the entire Barents Sea, separating biogeographic food-web regions. Our study provides further evidence that food-web structure is linked to broad-scale environmental gradients through environmental constraints on niche space and environmental filtering of species spatial distributions. We also showed that the current climate-driven poleward shift of boreal fish in the Barents Sea affects the arctic food web by ...

Fatty Acid Composition at the Base of Aquatic Food Webs Is Influenced by Habitat Type and Watershed Land Use. Larson JH, Richardson WB, Knights BC, Bartsch LA, Bartsch MR, Nelson JC, Veldboom JA, Vallazza JM, 2013, Fatty Acid Composition at the Base of Aquatic Food Webs Is Influenced by Habitat Type and Watershed Land Use. PLoS ONE, v 8, i 8, e70666. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0070666. Abstract. Spatial variation in food resources strongly influences many aspects of aquatic consumer ecology. Although large-scale controls over spatial variation in many aspects of food resources are well known, others have received little study. Here we investigated variation in the fatty acid (FA) composition of seston and primary consumers within (i.e., among habitats) and among tributary systems of Lake Michigan, USA. FA composition of food is important because all metazoans require certain FAs for proper growth and development that cannot be produced de novo, including many polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs). ...

Primary consumers make up the second trophic level as they feed on primary producers. In other words, primary consumers are organisms that take up food directly from plants.

Biodiversity increases the ability of ecosystems to provide multiple functions. Most studies report a positive relationship between species richness and the number of ecosystem functions. However, it is not known whether the number of functional groups is related to the structure of the underlying species interaction network. Here we present food web data from 115 salt marsh islands and show that network structure is associated with the number of functional groups present. Functional group diversity is heterogeneously distributed across spatial scales, with some islands hosting more functional groups than others. Functional groups form modules within the community so that food webs with more modular architectures have more functional group diversity. Further, in communities with different interaction types, modularity can be seen as the multifunctional equivalent of trophic complementarity. Collectively, these findings reveal spatial heterogeneity in the number of functional groups that emerges from

The enantiomeric composition of seven chiral PCB congeners was measured in the Lake Superior aquatic food web sampled in 1998, to determine the extent of enantioselective biotransformation in aquatic biota. All chiral PCB congeners studied (CBs 91, 95, 136, 149, 174, 176, and 183) biomagnified in the Lake Superior aquatic food web, based on biomagnification and food web magnification factors greater than unity. PCB atropisomers were racemic in phytoplankton and zooplankton, suggesting no biotransformation potential toward PCBs for these low trophic level organisms. However, Diporeia and mysids had significantly nonracemic residues for most chiral congeners studied. This observation suggests that these macrozooplankton can stereoselectively metabolize chiral congeners. Alternatively, macrozooplankton obtained nonracemic residues from feeding on organic-rich suspended particles and sediments, which would imply that stereoselective microbial PCB biotransformation may be occurring in Lake Superior sediments

The size and trophic structure of fluvial fish communities are driven by energy availability, competition, energy loss through trophic transfers, predation, and predator gape limitations. Size and trophic analyses can provide important information about overall food web structure and function of fish communities. Fish community assemblages were sampled in three tributaries of the Saginaw Bay watershed, Lake Huron in 2011 and 2012. We used a combination of community size-spectra (CSS, log abundance x log body-size regression), stable isotope, and trophic guild analyses to test the hypotheses that fluvial fish communities will be (a) strongly size-structured and (b) that variation in trophic guild composition will influence the community size-structure. Preliminary analyses indicate that the fish communities are strongly size-structured (mean CSS slope = -2.24), and there is a negative correlation between piscivores and Cyprinids (r = -0.64) and piscivores and large bodied low trophic position ...

Soil Food Web Definition - In horticulture, the soil food web refers to the community of living micro-organisms and organisms that live out and...

Functional biodiversity enables aquatic communities to remain stable despite stressors such as temperature rise, increasing stratification or eutrophication. The Working Group on Aquatic Food Webs investigates functional biodiversity with regard to the biotic and abiotic factors that regulate the principal acquisition mode for energy including phototrophy, mixotrophy, and heterotrophy including herbivory, carnivory, and detritivory (in the following trophic functional groups: TFGs) in different compartments of aquatic food webs, as well as their supply with nutrients (namely nitrogen).. This is done by the analysis of nitrogen stable isotopes in amino acids. For the first time, this analysis allows TFGs and their inorganic nitrogen sources to be determined together from the same field sample, so that both can be directly related to the environmental conditions on site. This enabled us to show for the first time that entire food webs were functionally adapted to cope with stratification and ...

Ecological restoration must achieve functional as well as structural recovery. Functional metrics for re-establishment of trophic interactions can be used to complement traditional monitoring of structural attributes. In addition, topographic effects on food web structure provide added information within a restoration context; often, created sites may require spatial heterogeneity to effectively match structure and function of natural habitats. We addressed both of these issues in our study of successional development of benthic food web structure, with focus on bottom-up-driven changes in macroinvertebrate consumer assemblages in the saltmarshes of the Venice Lagoon, Italy. We combined quantified estimates of the changing community composition with stable isotope data (C-13:C-12 and N-15:N-14) to compare the general trophic structure between created (2-14years) marshes and reference sites and along topographic elevation gradients within saltmarshes. Macrofaunal invertebrate consumers exhibited ...

An ecological network is a representation of the biotic interactions in an ecosystem, in which species (nodes) are connected by pairwise interactions (links). These interactions can be trophic or symbiotic. Ecological networks are used to describe and compare the structures of real ecosystems, while network models are used to investigate the effects of network structure on properties such as ecosystem stability. Historically, research into ecological networks developed from descriptions of trophic relationships in aquatic food webs; however, recent work has expanded to look at other food webs as well as webs of mutualists. Results of this work have identified several important properties of ecological networks. Complexity ([linkage density): the average number of links per species. Explaining the observed high levels of complexity in ecosystems has been one of the main challenges and motivations for ecological network analysis, since early theory predicted that complexity should lead to ...

The number of trophic transfers occurring between basal resources and top predators, food chain length (FCL), varies widely in the worlds ecosystems for reasons that are poorly understood, particularly for stream ecosystems. Available evidence indic

Food web and food chain The terms food chain and food web both refer to groups of organisms that are dependent on each other for food. A food chain is a single series of organisms in which each plant or animal depends on the organism above or below it. Source for information on Food Web and Food Chain: UXL Encyclopedia of Science dictionary.

Identifying causes of structural ecosystem shifts often requires understanding trophic structure, an important determinant of energy flow in ecological communities. fish generally experienced higher 15N and lower 13C relative to jellyfish, which resulted in low assemblage\level trophic overlap. Fish buy 616202-92-7 assemblages had larger market widths than jellyfish in most cases and, along with whole community trophic diversity, exhibited contrasting seasonal patterns across oceanographic basins, which was positively correlated to panorama variance in terrestrial Kit connectivity. In contrast, jellyfish market widths were unrelated to terrestrial connectivity, but weakly negatively correlated to urban land use in adjacent catchments. Our results indicate that fishCjellyfish trophic structure is highly heterogeneous and that disparate processes may underlie the trophic ecology of these taxa; consequently, they may respond divergently to environmental switch. In addition, spatiotemporal variance ...

|p|From whales to striped bass, important marine animals eat smaller fish and organisms to survive. These prey, or forage fish, in the food web are critical to a healthy ocean ecosystem. But people are not doing enough to ensure the abundance of prey species to feed valuable fish populations and marine life. The need to protect this basic prey, which ranges from mackerel and menhaden to herring and anchovies, is growing more urgent. Populations of some of these small fish have plummeted. Millions are scooped up by industrial fishing gear and ground into fertilizer and pet food. Millions more are caught by accident in trawler nets. Without this important food staple, diets are compromised, and its a scramble to find suitable substitutes. That disruption can send an unhealthy ripple effect stretching across the ocean ecosystem. Protecting the prey is fundamental to rebuilding depleted fish populations, conserving marine animals, and maintaining a balanced food web.|/p|

This volume provides a current synthesis of theoretical and empirical food web research. Whether they are binary systems or weighted networks, food webs are of particular interest to ecologists in providing a macroscopic view of ecosystems. They describe interactions between species and their environment, and subsequent advances in the understanding of their structure, function, and dynamics are of vital importance to ecosystem management and conservation.

Vitamin B complex foods include fish, sunflower seeds, meat, eggs and spinach. Read for recommended daily allowance of B Vitamins and tips to increase its intake.

Buy Consumer-Resource Dynamics (9780691006581) (9780691006574): NHBS - William W Murdoch, Cheryl J Briggs and Roger M Nisbet, Princeton University Press

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Freshwater influx drives the Alaska Coastal Current which in turn sustains commercial and subsistence fisheries as well as millions of coastal marine birds and mammals. Nearly half of this freshwater is derived from glacial melt-water, but we know little about how this glacial runoff contributes to marine production in glacial-marine ecosystems. This question is timely given the widespread and rapid retreat of glaciers in Alaska owing to global warming. Water and organic nutrients derived from terrestrial sources have distinct isotopic signatures compared to those of marine origin. We hypothesize that organic nutrients of terrestrial origin significantly enhance secondary and tertiary productivity in glacial-marine pelagic food webs. This study traces the flow of nutrients and organic matter through marine food webs using stable and radio isotopes. To better understand the scale at which glacial runoff influences food webs in coastal waters, we also examine the extent of freshwater infiltration ...

Food webs are organized into three main categories, depending on the kinds of organisms they contain. These three categories are known as trophic levels. The three primary trophic levels are those that consist of (1) producers, (2) consumers, and (3) decomposers. Producers are organisms that can make their own organic compounds or food using energy and simple inorganic compounds. Producers are sometimes called autotrophs, meaning self-feeders. For example, green plants are autotrophs because they manufacture the compounds they need through photosynthesis. The next trophic level above the producers consists of consumers. Consumers are organisms that cannot make their own foods and so have to eat other organisms to obtain the nutrients they use. The consumer trophic level can be subdivided depending on the kind of organisms included. Immediately above the producers are the herbivores, organisms that eat plants only. Some common examples of the herbivores include squirrels, rabbits, mice, deer, ...

Small herbivorous mammals appear to have the capacity to control the expansion of northern woody plants, but predators have the potential to prevent this by limiting rodent numbers. According to our results, primary productivity determines whether small mammals are regulated by predation or whether they are food limited and, hence, control the vegetation. Conversely, colleagues working on the coastal tundra have found evidence for predation limitation of lemmings even from unproductive tundra areas. Our working hypothesis is that this contrast reflects the subsidizing effect of marine-based resources on terrestrial food web dynamics. We will test this hypothesis by conducting parallel studies on predator-rodent-plant interactions in coastal and inland tundra.. Prof. Erkki Korpimäki, Univ. Of Turku (ekorpi[at]utu.fi). Senior Res. Tarja Oksanen, Univ. of Turku (tarja.oksanen[at]utu.fi) ...

Trawl bans are relatively uncommon, particularly at the level of an entire coastal jurisdiction, and have seldom been studied in the tropics. A permanent territory-wide trawl ban has been implemented in Hong Kong coastal waters since the beginning of 2013. We used isotope-based metrics, in addition to traditional community measurements, to determine whether benthic crustacean assemblages had shown any signs of recovery three years after the trawl ban. We expected increases in species richness, abundance and biomass as well as shifts in trophic structure, including longer food-chain length (FCL) and greater trophic diversity after the ban. We further anticipated that carnivorous crustaceans would have higher mean trophic positions (MTPoC) at the assemblage level, and broader trophic niches at the species level. Sampling was undertaken at six sites in three regions (eastern, western and southern waters) before (in 2012) and after (in 2015) the ban. In general, there were no changes in assemblage ...

Ecosystem engineers. More and more scientific studies emphasize the importance of ecosystem engineers in intertidal areas such as the Wadden Sea. Ecosystem engineers are organisms that not only respond to environmental conditions (such as sediment properties and hydrodynamics), but also strongly influence them by their presence. They create suitable living conditions for themselves as well as for other species. Thus they play a key role in retaining biodiversity and the natural functioning of ecosystems.. Restore musselbeds, increase diversity. The participants in the project Waddensleutels investigate whether restoring ecosystem engineers - especially mussel beds - can restore the ecosystem to a more species-rich and complex food web, with herbivores, predators of herbivores, predators of these predators, and finally top predators. In an experiment to be carried out at a number of locations in the Wadden Sea, resaearchers attempt to restore mussel beds.. Stable isotopes. In addition, on the ...

New research indicates that the acidification and warmer temperatures caused by climate change negatively impact marine food webs and biodiversity.

Stable isotopes are widely used to identify trophic interactions and to determine trophic positions of organisms in food webs. Comparative studies have provided general insights into the variation in isotopic composition between consumers and their diet (discrimination factors) in predator-prey and herbivore-plant relationships while other major components of food webs such as host-parasite interactions have been largely overlooked.

Historically, the Center has been the basin-wide leader in fisheries science in deepwater habitat. In fact, the Center has invaluable long-term data sets (dating back to the 1970s) that have been used to understand how biotic and abiotic factors drive long-term fish community and population dynamics. As a result, the Center is well positioned to be a leading contributor to an emerging interdisciplinary approach to understanding Great Lakes food webs. In addition, Center scientists are increasingly using our fleet of research platforms to sample biota at lower trophic levels. The Center continues to develop ecosystem-level models that improve our understanding of food web structure and function, which also allow managers to explore different what if management scenarios. As a whole, deepwater research will build on its strong history by collaborating with complementary researchers from agencies and academic institutions to 1) deliver and improve on our long-term fish population data series and ...

The topology of ecological communities is structured through the many and varied interactions active in food webs [1]. Direct trophic interactions, mutualism, competition, commensalism and parasitism are all modes that interconnect various elements of a community and to a certain extent, govern overall ecosystem dynamics [2]. There is also a growing realization that there are subtler, indirect effects in play [3,4] where third-party actors can be subsumed to play the role of a bait or a protector. The interaction of direct and indirect effects is most evident in so-called intra-guild predation, a tri-trophic arrangement where a consumer and its predator share a common resource [5]. While ecological communities are often described by the topology of the connections among species, their dynamics are controlled by the strength of the interactions these connections represent [6]. Further, the strength of these interactions is not static. Whatever the architecture of ecological communities, the ...

By Ivano Aiello (28 July 2016). Popular science magazines and documentaries depict marine scientists as sea going adventurers equipped with a pair of binoculars or a fish net, or explorers who dive in the abyss using SCUBA or with submersibles to observe the big things that populate the oceans.. The development of modern marine science in the last century has demonstrated that it is only by fully understanding the small-scale processes and features that we improve our knowledge of the vastness and complexity of the oceans habitats. In a sense, the small (the micro) is the new frontier to understand the big (the macro).. The numbers speak for themselves. According to recent estimates, about ½ of the global biomass (the weight of all living things) could be made of single celled microbes most of which live in or underneath the oceans. Big living things are at the top of very complex food webs while foundations are made of often very small organisms: for instance a whale can consume as much ...

e) Which organism is a secondary consumer ? We eat bot… and Inverse Proportions, Areas The carbon cycle is an important gaseous cycle which has its reservoir pool in the atmosphere. Try it now. The transfer of food energy from the producers, through a series of organisms (herbivores to carnivores to decomposers) with repeated eating and being eaten, is known as food chain. The path of energy in a feeding relationship between organisms is called A FOOD CHAIN. A food chain starts with the primary energy source. Himachal Board exam dates 2021 for class 12, 10 announced, exams dates will be released soon. (d) None of the above In ecosystem …chains is made up of decomposers, those heterotrophs that break down dead organisms and organic wastes. Which of the food chain directly depends on solar radiations? (c) In aquatic ecosystems, the limiting factor for the productivity is _________. DRAFT. Living Systems as Energy Converters documents the proceedings of the European Conference on Living Systems ...

The Division of Environmental Biology at the National Science Foundation has recommended that Harvard Forest Senior Ecologist Aaron Ellisons proposal Moths, ants, and carnivorous plants: the spatial dimension of species interactions be funded, beginning March 1, 2006. The goal of this 5-year, $585,000 research project, is to understand how species interactions change the spatial distribution of dynamic habitat patches across the landscape, and to determine how food webs are structured within and among these patches.. ...

All organisms, both land-based and aquatic, are interconnected by their need for food. This network of interconnections is referred to as a food web. The entire earth can be considered a single global food web, and food webs can also be described for a particular environment. At the base of any food web are organisms that make their own food, followed by the animals that eat them, then the animals that eat those animals, and so forth ...

All organisms, both land-based and aquatic, are interconnected by their need for food. This network of interconnections is referred to as a food web. The entire earth can be considered a single global food web, and food webs can also be described for a particular environment. At the base of any food web are organisms that make their own food, followed by the animals that eat them, then the animals that eat those animals, and so forth ...

Climate-change induced alterations of the organic matter flow from various primary production sources to the benthic system in the Arctic Chukchi Sea could have major implications on carbon cycling, sequestration, and benthic food web structure sustaining upper trophic levels. In particular, the role and contribution of terrestrial matter and bacterial matter could become more prominent, with increasing erosion and permafrost melt being discharged from land, and warming water temperatures raising bacterial metabolism. In this study, I used essential amino acid (EAA) specific stable isotope analysis to trace the proportional contributions of bacterial, phytoplankton, and terrestrial organic matter in sediments, as well as benthic invertebrates on the Chukchi Sea shelf. Across the upper 5 cm of sediments, most organic matter sources were equally distributed, except for a slight decrease with depth in phytoplankton EAA. Terrestrial sources contributed the majority of EAA (~76 %) in all sediment ...

We had planned tasks as a learning journey activity this week, some children had used these to entertain themselves and their friends on the way there and back.. The Aratiatia team embarked on a jam packed day exploring, catching, classifying and learning about Our Place and how everything works together to make it healthy. We learnt about food chains and food webs, how everything is interlinked and if you remove the balance it all falls over. We made a food web model.. ...

The mission of our research group is to reveal the role of infectious diseases in ecosystems. We investigate parasite ecology, disease ecology, food web dynamics, ecology and evolution of infectious strategies, and control of human parasites ...

The energy is passed on from trophic level to trophic level and each time about 90% of the energy is lost, with some being lost as heat into the environment (an effect of respiration) and some being lost as incompletely digested food (egesta). Therefore, primary consumers get about 10% of the energy produced by autotrophs, while secondary consumers get 1% and tertiary consumers get 0.1%. This means the top consumer of a food chain receives the least energy, as a lot of the food chains energy has been lost between trophic levels. This loss of energy at each level limits typical food chains to only four to six links. ...

Inhibitory analysis in ecology.. This is about a discovery and innovation in environmental sciences and ecology, item 3 on the list of 18 (the list see here [3]). This new approach in ecology allows to see better the real role of organisms of a higher trophic level in regulation of the organisms of a lower trophic level.. The method that was applied was to inhibit the functional activity of the organisms of a higher trophic level and to observe the consequences: what happens with the organisms of a LOWER trophic level.. It was done by the inventor of this methodology in the laboratory experimental systems with bivalve mollusks that that a higher trophic level organisms as compared to phytoplankton algae. The algae are a lower trophic level organisms as compared to bivalve mollusks. The bivalves feed on algae.. In my experiments, I decreased trophic activity of bivalves using special chemical inhibitors. I used my previous discovery that some chemical - surfactants - can decrease filtering ...

Detection of pathogens present in food samples typically takes at least 12 to 36 hours in food safety labs. But a small chip developed by researchers at the University of Maryland promises to speed the process up considerably, detecting pathogens in less than an hour.. This new innovation, created by Associate Professor Javier Atencia-Fernandez of the Fischell Department of Bioengineering, is one of nine nominees for Invention of the Year Award. Atencia-Fernandez said that his new apparatus extracts bacteria from food samples without enrichment-the procedure of increasing the number of bacteria to enable pathogen detection without interference from the food matrix-and is therefore very rapid. Typically, [it takes] 30 minutes to extract 75% of the bacteria, 2.5 hours to extract 99%, he said.. Atencia-Fernandez said that there is a pressing commercial need for technologies like his, which reduce or eliminate the process of enrichment prior to detection. The time required for enrichment was the ...

In this application note, learn how mass detection can be deployed in food QC lab environments to provide the selectivity and sensitivity necessary to detect low levels of compounds in complex matrices, such as orange juice.

Manufactured foodstuffs typically exist in the form of complex, multi-phase, multi-component, colloidal systems. One way to try to make sense of their chemical and structural complexity is to study simple model systems in which the nature and properties of the polymer molecules and dispersed particles are relatively well : Elsevier Science.

Work in the chemical ecology and tropical diversity laboratory focuses on direct and indirect trophic interactions in complex biotic communities with emphases on global change, documenting the diversity of multi-trophic interactions, and examining the effects of plant secondary compounds on insect herbivores and their natural enemies. The main source of funding for our research comes from the National Science Foundation, Earthwatch Institute, the Department of Defense, and private funding sources. The major continuing research topics of our laboratory and collaborators include: 1) Chemical ecology; 2) Diversity of interactions in tropical and temperate forests; 3) Variation in tritrophic interactions due to climate change; 4) Conservation and applied ecology; 5) Quantitative ecology; 6)Coevolution across multiple trophic levels ...

why are decomposers important to the food chain food web with decomposers decomposers in food chain consumers in ecosystem decomposers in an ecosystem