Aim Insects provide essential ecosystem services, but there is a concern that insect abundance is in rapid decline. Identifying trends in insect biodiversity is challenging because we lack baseline data for most biogeographic regions, and most insect species remain undescribed. Here, we aim to report the first nationwide inventory of insect biodiversity in South Africa. Location Eleven National Botanical Gardens representing f...

Rotifers perform key functions in aquatic food webs and respond to environmental changes, thus providing sensitive indicators of water quality. However, rotifers are small, highly diverse, and difficult to identify for those lacking expertise. Monogononta are the largest taxonomic class of rotifers with over 1500 species described globally, and around 355 known from New Zealand; only four of these are currently recognised as e...

Local delivery of biotherapeutics to the lung holds great promise for treatment of lung diseases, but development of physically stable, biologically active dry powder formulations of large molecules for inhalation has remained a challenge. Here, spray drying was used to manufacture a dry powder pulmonary formulation of bevacizumab, a monoclonal antibody approved to treat non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) by intravenous infusi...

Carbonate-bearing fluorapatite rocks occur at over 30 globally distributed carbonatite complexes and represent a substantial potential supply of phosphorus for the fertiliser industry. However, the process(es) involved in forming carbonate-bearing fluorapatite at some carbonatites remain equivocal, with both hydrothermal and weathering mechanisms inferred. In this contribution, we compare the paragenesis and trace element cont...

As a megadiverse country with a rapidly growing population, South Africa is experiencing a biodiversity crisis: natural habitats are being degraded and species are becoming threatened with extinction. In an era of big biodiversity data and limited conservation resources, conservation biologists are challenged to use such data for cost-effective conservation planning. However, while extensive, key genomic and distributional dat...

Burn infections caused by Pseudomonas aeruginosa pose a major complication in wound healing. This study aimed to determine the antimicrobial effect of metal ions, graphene (Gr), and graphene oxide (GO), individually and in combination, against the planktonic and biofilm states of two antimicrobially resistant clinical strains of P. aeruginosa each with different antibiotic resistance profiles. Minimum inhibitory, minimum bacte...

Aim Although existing bioregional classification schemes often consider the compositional affinities within regional biotas, they do not typically incorporate phylogenetic information explicitly. Because phylogeny captures information on the evolutionary history of taxa, it provides a powerful tool for delineating biogeographical boundaries and for establishing relationships among them. Here, we present the first vegetation de...

We tested the hypothesis that cytochrome c oxidase subunit 1 (COI) sequences would successfully discriminate recognised species of New Zealand caddisflies. We further examined whether phylogenetic analyses, based on the COI locus, could recover currently recognised superfamilies and suborders. COI sequences were obtained from 105 individuals representing 61 species and all 16 families of Trichoptera known from New Zealand. No...

Summary The gut of animals changes quickly from a totally sterile environment before birth to a numerous and highly diverse microbial community shortly after birth. However, few studies have examined the source of the bacteria colonizing the gut. We used a genetic based approach to investigate the distribution and acquisition of faecal microbial communities by Adelie penguins, Pygoscelis adeliae , breeding in the Ross Sea regi...