In aquatic microbial communities, the most abundant players, the viruses, remain unexplored. Some of them can infect and kill bacteria, those viruses are named bacteriophages or simply phages. Phages influence microbial community ecology affecting nutrient cycle.
Small bacterivorous protists play a fundamental role in aquatic food webs and their taxonomic classification and ecological traits currently belong to core topics in aquatic microbial ecology. Despite the importance of shallow lakes worldwide, knowledge of microbial components, the base of their food webs, remains scarce. To close this gap, we investigated planktonic microbial food webs, in...
Asgardarchaeota, a phylum-level division within the Archaea domain of life, comprises the closest extant relatives of the eukaryotes (discovered to date). Known only from metagenomics-based reconstructions, the members of this clade are found to harbour the most extensive repertoire of eukaryotic specific genes found in prokaryotes, and are expected to shed light on the elusive...
New Zealand and other islands have experienced invasions of rats and other species, Europe has seen the arrival of diseases such as the crayfish plague: invasive species can put native animal and plant species on the brink of extinction. They often go undetected for a long time, or their damaging impacts are not immediately clear. This phenomenon – referred to as crypticity – represents a huge...
Large numbers of bacteria live in freshwater lakes and reservoirs. The microbial universe of these ecosystems is largely unexplored due to our current inability to grow these tiny lifeforms under laboratory conditions. A joint research team from the Department of Aquatic Microbial Ecology (Institute of Hydrobiology, BC, CAS) recently discovered new groups of bacteria thriving in aquatic...
Climate change will strongly affect many European freshwater fish species. This is particularly the case for species in the Mediterranean region, according to the latest findings of an international team of researchers from institutions including the Biology Centre of the Czech Academy of Sciences, Leibniz-Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries (IGB) in Germany, the University of...
Our new booming boat type MS Boat S500WT arrived a few days ago. The boat will be used mainly for inshore electrofishing on large standing waters. For this purpose, it is equipped with a powerful engine powered electrofisher achieving an DC and pulse current output of up to 300/600 V.
Lukáš Vejřík became the winner of the Zdeněk Veselovský Prize for the best student publication in the field of ethology for 2018 for a study focused on the food behavior of catfish. The award is given by the Czech and Slovak ethological society.
Representatives of the phylum Chloroflexi, though reportedly highly abundant in the extensive deep water habitats of both marine (SAR202 up to 30% of total prokaryotes) and freshwater (CL500-11 up to 26% of total prokaryotes), remain uncultivated and uncharacterized. There are few metagenomic studies on marine Chloroflexi representatives, while the pelagic freshwater Chloroflexi community is...
