Sustainable life support systems are essential for successful human space exploration beyond Earth. While soil fungi are potential candidates for exploitation in space, this review addresses contentious hypotheses, such as panspermia or putative Martian fungi, with scientific caution. The unique characteristics of mushrooms in extraterrestrial environments include their versatility, nutritional value, and tolerance of bioregen...

Ferroptosis is a newly discovered form of cell death accompanied by iron accumulation and lipid peroxidation. Both biotic and abiotic stresses can induce ferroptosis in plant cells. In the case of plant interactions with pathogenic Phytophthora oomycetes, the roles of ferroptosis are still largely unknown. Here, we performed transcriptome analysis on soybean plants treated with the biocontrol agent Pythium oligandrum , a soilb...

Summary Type II toxin‐antitoxin (TA) systems modulate many essential cellular processes in prokaryotic organisms. Recent studies indicate certain type II antitoxins also transcriptionally regulate other genes, besides neutralizing toxin activity. Herein, we investigated the diverse transcriptional repression properties of type II TA antitoxin PaHigA from Pseudomonas aeruginosa . Biochemical and functional analyses showed that...

Summary Nitric oxide (NO) is an important signalling molecule in stress response of organisms. We previously reported that NO decreases heat stress (HS)‐induced ganoderic acid (GA) accumulation in Ganoderma lucidum . To explore the mechanisms by which NO modulates GA biosynthesis under HS, the effect of NO on the reactive oxygen species (ROS) content was examined. The results showed that NO decreased the production of mitochon...

The Asian flea beetles Altica cirsicola , Altica fragariae and Altica viridicyanea are broadly sympatric and morphologically highly similar but feed on distantly related host plants. They have been suggested as a model for ecological speciation studies. However, their phylogeny and species limits remain uncertain. In this study, we added mitochondrial genomes from multiple individuals of each species to the growing database. P...

Summary Colorectal cancer (CRC) is a common disease worldwide that is strongly associated with the gut microbiota. However, little is known regarding the gut microbiota after surgical treatment. 16S rRNA gene sequencing was used to evaluate differences in gut microbiota among colorectal adenoma patients, CRC patients, CRC postoperative patients and healthy controls by comparing gut microbiota diversity, overall composition and...