TY - JOUR A1 - Birkhofer, Klaus A1 - Schöning, Ingo A1 - Alt, Fabian A1 - Herold, Nadine A1 - Klarner, Bernhard A1 - Maraun, Mark A1 - Marhan, Sven A1 - Oelmann, Yvonne A1 - Wubet, Tesfaye A1 - Yurkov, Andrey A1 - Begerow, Dominik A1 - Berner, Doreen A1 - Buscot, Francois A1 - Daniel, Rolf A1 - Diekötter, Tim A1 - Ehnes, Roswitha B. A1 - Erdmann, Georgia A1 - Fischer, Christiane A1 - Fösel, Baerbel A1 - Groh, Janine A1 - Gutknecht, Jessica A1 - Kandeler, Ellen A1 - Lang, Christa A1 - Lohaus, Gertrud A1 - Meyer, Annabel A1 - Nacke, Heiko A1 - Näther, Astrid A1 - Overmann, Jörg A1 - Polle, Andrea A1 - Pollierer, Melanie M. A1 - Scheu, Stefan A1 - Schloter, Michael A1 - Schulze, Ernst-Detlef A1 - Schulze, Waltraud X. A1 - Weinert, Jan A1 - Weisser, Wolfgang W. A1 - Wolters, Volkmar A1 - Schrumpf, Marion T1 - General relationships between abiotic soil properties and soil biota across spatial scales and different land-use types JF - PLoS one N2 - Very few principles have been unraveled that explain the relationship between soil properties and soil biota across large spatial scales and different land-use types. Here, we seek these general relationships using data from 52 differently managed grassland and forest soils in three study regions spanning a latitudinal gradient in Germany. We hypothesize that, after extraction of variation that is explained by location and land-use type, soil properties still explain significant proportions of variation in the abundance and diversity of soil biota. If the relationships between predictors and soil organisms were analyzed individually for each predictor group, soil properties explained the highest amount of variation in soil biota abundance and diversity, followed by land-use type and sampling location. After extraction of variation that originated from location or land-use, abiotic soil properties explained significant amounts of variation in fungal, meso-and macrofauna, but not in yeast or bacterial biomass or diversity. Nitrate or nitrogen concentration and fungal biomass were positively related, but nitrate concentration was negatively related to the abundances of Collembola and mites and to the myriapod species richness across a range of forest and grassland soils. The species richness of earthworms was positively correlated with clay content of soils independent of sample location and land-use type. Our study indicates that after accounting for heterogeneity resulting from large scale differences among sampling locations and land-use types, soil properties still explain significant proportions of variation in fungal and soil fauna abundance or diversity. However, soil biota was also related to processes that act at larger spatial scales and bacteria or soil yeasts only showed weak relationships to soil properties. We therefore argue that more general relationships between soil properties and soil biota can only be derived from future studies that consider larger spatial scales and different land-use types. Y1 - 2012 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0043292 SN - 1932-6203 VL - 7 IS - 8 PB - PLoS CY - San Fransisco ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Christian, Jan-Ole A1 - Braginets, Rostyslav A1 - Schulze, Waltraud X. A1 - Walther, Dirk T1 - Characterization and prediction of protein phosphorylation hotspots in Arabidopsis thaliana JF - Frontiers in plant science N2 - The regulation of protein function by modulating the surface charge status via sequence-locally enriched phosphorylation sites (P-sites) in so called phosphorylation "hotspots" has gained increased attention in recent years. We set out to identify P-hotspots in the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana. We analyzed the spacing of experimentally detected P-sites within peptide-covered regions along Arabidopsis protein sequences as available from the PhosPhAt database. Confirming earlier reports (Schweiger and Lanial, 2010), we found that, indeed, P-sites tend to cluster and that distributions between serine and threonine P-sites to their respected closest next P-site differ significantly from those for tyrosine P-sites. The ability to predict P-hotspots by applying available computational P-site prediction programs that focus on identifying single P-sites was observed to be severely compromised by the inevitable interference of nearby P-sites. We devised a new approach, named HotSPotter, for the prediction of phosphorylation hotspots. HotSPotter is based primarily on local amino acid compositional preferences rather than sequence position-specific motifs and uses support vector machines as the underlying classification engine. HotSPotter correctly identified experimentally determined phosphorylation hotspots in A. thaliana with high accuracy. Applied to the Arabidopsis proteome, HotSPotter-predicted 13,677 candidate P-hotspots in 9,599 proteins corresponding to 7,847 unique genes. Hotspot containing proteins are involved predominantly in signaling processes confirming the surmised modulating role of hotspots in signaling and interaction events. Our study provides new bioinformatics means to identify phosphorylation hotspots and lays the basis for further investigating novel candidate P-hotspots. All phosphorylation hotspot annotations and predictions have been made available as part of the PhosPhAt database at http://phosphat.mpimp-golm.mpg.de. KW - protein phosphorylation KW - hotspots KW - Arabidopsis thaliana KW - support vector machines KW - regulation Y1 - 2012 U6 - https://doi.org/10.3389/fpls.2012.00207 SN - 1664-462X VL - 3 PB - Frontiers Research Foundation CY - Lausanne ER -