Respiratory cilia play a crucial role in clearing pathogens from the airway, and understanding how Pseudomonas aeruginosa (PA) impairs their function is essential for developing targeted therapies to enhance airway epithelial defense and hamper bacterial invasion. Thus, we investigated the mechanisms by which PA impairs respiratory cilia function and identified pharmacological interventions to restore cilia motility. We used m...

Ongoing and future climate change impacts call for climate-resilient development that integrates adaptive and mitigative approaches. Climatic and non-climatic shocks, which are rare and disruptive events, might promote transformative changes and effectively improve climate resilience. Following the IPCC’s concept of Climate Resilient Development Pathways (CRDPs), we use document analysis and semi-structured interviews with n =...

Future shocks from climate change impacts will likely overstretch current individual coping capacities. Integrated policy strategies could foster sustainable and resilient reactions of households and businesses by rebuilding for transformative recovery instead of bouncing back to the pre-shock status. We present the Strategy Shock Implementation Reaction (SSIR) framework as a conceptual framework for bridging the design of pol...

Harmful blooms of the filamentous cyanobacteria Planktothrix rubescens have become common in many lakes as they have recovered from eutrophication over the last decades. These cyanobacteria, capable of regulating their vertical position, often flourish at the thermocline to form a deep chlorophyll maximum. In Lake Zurich (Switzerland), they accumulate during stratified season (May–October) as a persistent metalimnetic thin lay...

Microbial planktonic communities are the basis of food webs in aquatic ecosystems since they contribute substantially to primary production and nutrient recycling. Network analyses of DNA metabarcoding data sets emerged as a powerful tool to untangle the complex ecological relationships among the key players in food webs. In this study, we evaluated co‐occurrence networks constructed from time‐series metabarcoding data sets (1...

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 particular protistan bacterivory (for both ciliates and heterotrophic nanoflagellates [HNF]), in 10 shallow hypertrophic fishponds in South Bohemia (Czech Republic). We used fluorescently labeled bacteria as bacterivory tracers t...

Summary While mechanisms of different carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) assimilation pathways in chemolithoautotrohic prokaryotes are well understood for many isolates under laboratory conditions, the ecological significance of diverse CO 2 fixation strategies in the environment is mostly unexplored. Six stratified freshwater lakes were chosen to study the distribution and diversity of the Calvin‐Benson‐Bassham (CBB) cycle, the reductive...

Summary The ecological relevance and factors shaping dynamics of Limnohabitans sp. have been largely studied by fluorescence in situ hybridization with a 16S rRNA probe targeting the R‐BT group (lineages LimBCDE), but not lineage LimA. Consequently, ecology and distribution of LimA remained unknown. We developed a double hybridization strategy using a novel 23S rRNA probe specifically targeting LimA and LimE that in combinatio...

Summary We studied the seasonal growth potential of opportunistic bacterial populations in L ake Z urich ( S witzerland) by a series of grazer‐free dilution culture assays. Pronounced shifts in the composition of the bacterial assemblages were observed within one doubling of total cell numbers, from initially abundant A ctinobacteria to other fast‐growing microbial lineages. Small populations with growth potentials far above c...

Short‐term changes in temporal and spatial distributions of the toxic cyanobacterium Planktothrix rubescens in Lake Zurich were investigated using high‐resolution data sets acquired with an autonomous surface vessel (ASV). Data profiles were recorded with a multi‐parameter probe while the ASV navigated along 1.5 km toward a waypoint located on the other side of the lake by using a global positioning system. We deployed the ASV...

Summary The vernal successions of phytoplankton, heterotrophic nanoflagellates (HNF) and viruses in temperate lakes result in alternating dominance of top‐down and bottom‐up factors on the bacterial community. This may lead to asynchronous blooms of bacteria with different life strategies and affect the channelling of particular components of the dissolved organic matter (DOM) through microbial food webs. We followed the dynam...

Summary We examined the effect of light on the heterotrophic activity of the filamentous cyanobacterium Planktothrix rubescens and on its relationship with the accompanying bacteria. In situ leucine uptake by bacteria and cyanobacteria was determined in a subalpine mesotrophic lake, and natural assemblages from the zone of maximal P. rubescens abundances were incubated for 2 days at contrasting light regimes (ambient, 100× inc...

The pelagic zone of large, deep freshwater lakes features pronounced horizontal and vertical gradients of physicochemical parameters, which in turn might allow for a nonuniform occurrence of specifically adapted bacterial taxa. We, therefore, studied the spatial distribution patterns of different heterotrophic bacteria, picocyanobacteria, and the dominant primary producer, the filamentous cyanobacterium Planktothrix rubescens...

The spatiotemporal changes in abundance and biomass of heterotrophic bacteria, of three major bacterial phylogenetic groups, and of picocyanobacteria in the upper 20 m of a deep prealpine lake (Lake Zurich, Switzerland) were monitored during a seasonally persistent bloom of the toxigenic filamentous cyanobacterium Planktothrix rubescens . In addition, bacterial 16S ribosomal deoxyribonucleic acid (rDNA) sequences were collecte...

We explored the seasonal and vertical patterns of cell numbers, biomass, and amino acid incorporation of three major phylogenetic groups of the bacterioplankton in an oligomesotrophic alpine lake. Throughout the year the numerically dominant bacteria in the oxygenated epilimnion were small Actinobacteria . The timing and vertical location of their spring peak coincided with that of the heterotrophic flagellates (HNF). A second...

Summary We investigated the diversity of planktonic Betaproteobacteria and the seasonal population changes of betaproteobacterial taxa in an oligo‐mesotrophic lake (Piburger See, Austria). Focus was put on the vertical distribution of the investigated populations and on differences between their respective cell fractions with apparent amino acid incorporation. On average, 66% of betaproteobacterial cells and 73% of their diver...