The human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine is a safe, effective cancer prevention method that is underutilized in the United States. Despite increased understanding of barriers to vaccination, rates ...remain low. Globally, developed and developing nations have achieved high rates of vaccination.
Identification of effective strategies is necessary to optimize uptake of the HPV vaccine. We systematically reviewed the literature for national and international interventions that have successfully increased HPV vaccine uptake.
We used a standardized protocol to search for articles published between January 1, 2006, and April 30, 2015, in 3 electronic databases: PubMed, Scopus, and Embase.
We identified interventions designed to increase HPV vaccine uptake among adolescents and young adults aged 11 to 26 years. All study designs were acceptable. Only articles that included postintervention vaccination rates were included.
Two authors independently reviewed each article for data extraction and quality assessment. Interventions were classified according to the Community Preventive Service Task Force guide.
Results were reported according to the RE-AIM (Reach, Effectiveness, Adoption, Implementation, Maintenance) framework. Fifty-one articles met eligibility criteria: 2 informational interventions, 18 behavioral interventions, and 31 environmental interventions. Factors associated with HPV vaccine uptake were increased vaccine availability, decreased financial barriers, and interventions targeting both providers and patients.
Lack of consistent RE-AIM metric reporting, limiting our ability to assess intervention validity and quality.
Population-based vaccination strategies that increased vaccine availability reached the greatest number of adolescents and were most successful in achieving high rates of vaccination.
A major goal of microbial ecology is to identify links between microbial community structure and microbial processes. Although this objective seems straightforward, there are conceptual and ...methodological challenges to designing studies that explicitly evaluate this link. Here, we analyzed literature documenting structure and process responses to manipulations to determine the frequency of structure-process links and whether experimental approaches and techniques influence link detection. We examined nine journals (published 2009–13) and retained 148 experimental studies measuring microbial community structure and processes. Many qualifying papers (112 of 148) documented structure and process responses, but few (38 of 112 papers) reported statistically testing for a link. Of these tested links, 75% were significant and typically used Spearman or Pearson's correlation analysis (68%). No particular approach for characterizing structure or processes was more likely to produce significant links. Process responses were detected earlier on average than responses in structure or both structure and process. Together, our findings suggest that few publications report statistically testing structure-process links. However, when links are tested for they often occur but share few commonalities in the processes or structures that were linked and the techniques used for measuring them.
Few publications reported statistically testing microbial community structure-process links; 75% of tested links were significant, though had few commonalities in which processes or structures were measured and the techniques used.
For any enzyme-catalyzed reaction to occur, the corresponding protein-encoding genes and transcripts are necessary prerequisites. Thus, a positive relationship between the abundance of gene or ...transcripts and corresponding process rates is often assumed. To test this assumption, we conducted a meta-analysis of the relationships between gene and/or transcript abundances and corresponding process rates. We identified 415 studies that quantified the abundance of genes or transcripts for enzymes involved in carbon or nitrogen cycling. However, in only 59 of these manuscripts did the authors report both gene or transcript abundance and rates of the appropriate process. We found that within studies there was a significant but weak positive relationship between gene abundance and the corresponding process. Correlations were not strengthened by accounting for habitat type, differences among genes or reaction products versus reactants, suggesting that other ecological and methodological factors may affect the strength of this relationship. Our findings highlight the need for fundamental research on the factors that control transcription, translation and enzyme function in natural systems to better link genomic and transcriptomic data to ecosystem processes.
Environmental metabolomes are fundamentally coupled to microbially-linked biogeochemical processes within ecosystems. However, significant gaps exist in our understanding of their spatiotemporal ...organization, limiting our ability to uncover transferrable principles and predict ecosystem function. We propose that a theoretical paradigm, which integrates concepts from metacommunity ecology, is necessary to reveal underlying mechanisms governing metabolomes. We call this synthesis between ecology and metabolomics 'meta-metabolome ecology' and demonstrate its utility using a mass spectrometry dataset. We developed three relational metabolite dendrograms using molecular properties and putative biochemical transformations and performed ecological null modeling. Based upon null modeling results, we show that stochastic processes drove molecular properties while biochemical transformations were structured deterministically. We further suggest that potentially biochemically active metabolites were more deterministically assembled than less active metabolites. Understanding variation in the influences of stochasticity and determinism provides a way to focus attention on which meta-metabolomes and which parts of meta-metabolomes are most likely to be important to consider in mechanistic models. We propose that this paradigm will allow researchers to study the connections between ecological systems and their molecular processes in previously inaccessible detail.
While it is now widely accepted that microorganisms provide essential functions in restoration ecology, the nature of relationships between microbial community assembly and ecosystem recovery remains ...unclear. There has been a longstanding challenge to decipher whether microorganisms facilitate or simply follow ecosystem recovery, and evidence for each is mixed at best. We propose that understanding microbial community assembly processes is critical to understanding the role of microorganisms during ecosystem restoration and thus optimizing management strategies. We examine how the connection between environment, community structure, and function is fundamentally underpinned by the processes governing community assembly of these microbial communities. We review important factors to consider in evaluating microbial community structure in the context of ecosystem recovery as revealed in studies of microbial succession: (1) variation in community assembly processes, (2) linkages to ecosystem function, and (3) measurable microbial community attributes. We seek to empower restoration ecology with microbial assembly and successional understandings that can generate actionable insights and vital contexts for ecosystem restoration efforts.
The hyporheic corridor (HC) encompasses the river-groundwater continuum, where the mixing of groundwater (GW) with river water (RW) in the HC can stimulate biogeochemical activity. Here we propose a ...novel thermodynamic mechanism underlying this phenomenon and reveal broader impacts on dissolved organic carbon (DOC) and microbial ecology. We show that thermodynamically favorable DOC accumulates in GW despite lower DOC concentration, and that RW contains thermodynamically less-favorable DOC, but at higher concentrations. This indicates that GW DOC is protected from microbial oxidation by low total energy within the DOC pool, whereas RW DOC is protected by lower thermodynamic favorability of carbon species. We propose that GW-RW mixing overcomes these protections and stimulates respiration. Mixing models coupled with geophysical and molecular analyses further reveal tipping points in spatiotemporal dynamics of DOC and indicate important hydrology-biochemistry-microbial feedbacks. Previously unrecognized thermodynamic mechanisms regulated by GW-RW mixing may therefore strongly influence biogeochemical and microbial dynamics in riverine ecosystems.
•278 out of 401 ARG-carrying MAGs were associated with nitrate reduction.•Antibiotic levels positively associated with prevalence of NRG-ARG co-hosts.•WWTP and wetlands were critical sources of ...NRG-ARG co-hosts.•Role of NRG-ARG co-hosts in nitrate reduction do not change with antibiotic levels.
Microbial co-hosts of nitrate reduction genes (NRGs) and antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) have been recently reported, but their ecology and biochemical role in urban waterways remain largely unknown. Here, we collected 29 surface water and 29 sediment samples in the Huangshui River on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau during the wet and dry season, and 11 water samples from wastewater treatment plants and wetlands along the river. Using metagenomic sequencing, we retrieved 278 medium-to-high-quality metagenome-assembled genomes (MAGs) of NRG-ARG co-hosts, mainly belonging to the phyla Proteobacteria, Actinobacteriota, and Bacteroidota. Of microorganisms carrying ARGs, a high proportion (75.3%‒94.9%) also encoded NRGs, supporting nitrate reducing bacteria as dominant hosts of ARGs. Seasonal changes in antibiotic levels corresponded to significant variation in the relative abundance of NRG-ARG co-host in both water and sediments, resulting in a concomitant change in antibiotic resistance pathways. In contrast, the contribution of NRG-ARG co-hosts to nitrate reduction was stable between seasons. We identify specific antibiotics (e.g., sulphonamides) and microbial taxa (e.g., Acinetobacter and Hafnia) that may disproportionately impact these relationships to serve as a basis for laboratory investigations into bioremediation strategies. Our study suggests that highly abundant nitrate reducing microorganisms in contaminated environments may also directly impact human health as carriers of antibiotic resistance.
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Ecological mechanisms influence relationships among microbial communities, which in turn impact biogeochemistry. In particular, microbial communities are assembled by deterministic (e.g., selection) ...and stochastic (e.g., dispersal) processes, and the relative balance of these two process types is hypothesized to alter the influence of microbial communities over biogeochemical function. We used an ecological simulation model to evaluate this hypothesis, defining biogeochemical function generically to represent any biogeochemical reaction of interest. We assembled receiving communities under different levels of dispersal from a source community that was assembled purely by selection. The dispersal scenarios ranged from no dispersal (i.e., selection-only) to dispersal rates high enough to overwhelm selection (i.e., homogenizing dispersal). We used an aggregate measure of community fitness to infer a given community’s biogeochemical function relative to other communities. We also used ecological null models to further link the relative influence of deterministic assembly to function. We found that increasing rates of dispersal decrease biogeochemical function by increasing the proportion of maladapted taxa in a local community. Niche breadth was also a key determinant of biogeochemical function, suggesting a tradeoff between the function of generalist and specialist species. Finally, we show that microbial assembly processes exert greater influence over biogeochemical function when there is variation in the relative contributions of dispersal and selection among communities. Taken together, our results highlight the influence of spatial processes on biogeochemical function and indicate the need to account for such effects in models that aim to predict biogeochemical function under future environmental scenarios.
Communities of soil microorganisms (soil microbiomes) play a major role in biogeochemical cycles and support of plant growth. Here we focus primarily on the roles that the soil microbiome plays in ...cycling soil organic carbon and the impact of climate change on the soil carbon cycle. We first discuss current challenges in understanding the roles carried out by highly diverse and heterogeneous soil microbiomes and review existing knowledge gaps in understanding how climate change will impact soil carbon cycling by the soil microbiome. Because soil microbiome stability is a key metric to understand as the climate changes, we discuss different aspects of stability, including resistance, resilience, and functional redundancy.We then review recent research pertaining to the impact of major climate perturbations on the soil microbiome and the functions that they carry out. Finally, we review new experimental methodologies and modeling approaches under development that should facilitate our understanding of the complex nature of the soil microbiome to better predict its future responses to climate change.
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