Summary Exposure to a diverse microbial environment during pregnancy and early postnatal period is important in determining predisposition towards allergy. However, the effect of environmental microbiota exposure during preconception, pregnancy and postnatal life on development of allergy in the child has not been investigated so far. In the S‐PRESTO (Singapore PREconception Study of long Term maternal and child Outcomes) coho...

The usefulness of species distribution models (SDMs) in predicting impacts of climate change on biodiversity is difficult to assess because changes in species ranges may take decades or centuries to occur. One alternative way to evaluate the predictive ability of SDMs across time is to compare their predictions with data on past species distributions. We use data on plant distributions, fossil pollen and current and mid‐Holoce...

Summary Among human faecal bacteria, many members of the Clostridium leptum subgroup are fibrolytic and butyrate producing microorganisms thereby contributing to processes important to colonic health. Yet this phylogenetic subgroup remains poorly described to date. To improve detection and description of members of the C. leptum subgroup, the Clep 866 group probe was developed. Its association with probes targeting the Clostri...