Ricerc@Sapienza

Ecologists routinely use dissimilarity measures between pairs of plots to explore the complex mechanisms that drive community assembly. Traditional dissimilarity measures usually quantify plot-to-plot dissimilarity based either on species presences and absences within plots or on species abundances, thus assuming that all species are equally and maximally distinct from one another. However, the value of dissimilarity measures that incorporate information on functional differences among species is becoming increasingly recognized.

Metagenomics is one of the newest omics system science technologies but also one that has arguably the broadest set of applications and impacts globally. Metagenomics has found vast utility not only in environmental sciences, ecology and public health but also in clinical medicine and looking into the future, in planetary health. In line with the One Health concept, metagenomics solicits collaboration between molecular biologists, geneticists, microbiologists, clinicians, computational biologists, plant biologists, veterinarians and other healthcare professionals.

Debjani Bhattacharya’s book brings to mind Debesh Ray’s acclaimed Bengali novel Tista Parer Brittanta (1988)1 in which a canny landlord in north Bengal takes the precaution of surveying and measuring submerged lands right up to the midstream of the notoriously restless river Tista, thereby laying prior claim to the char or sandbanks which would be formed through alluvium deposits and exposed once the river shifted its course.