Hard words

1. Biodiversity

  • Literary: The variety of living organisms in a specific area.
  • Scientific: The variability among living organisms from all sources, including terrestrial, marine, and other ecosystems, often measured by richness and evenness indices.

2. Rhizosphere
  • Literary: The soil that surrounds and is influenced by plant roots.
  • Scientific: A narrow zone of soil surrounding a plant's roots that hosts intense microbial activity due to root exudates.

3. Metagenomics
  • Literary: A method to study the genetic material of all organisms in an environment.
  • Scientific: The sequencing and analysis of genetic material directly recovered from environmental samples, used to profile microbial communities.

4. Microbiota
  • Literary: The community of tiny organisms (like bacteria) living in a specific environment.
  • Scientific: The collection of microorganisms (bacteria, archaea, fungi, etc.) living in association with a host or environment.

5. Arid Zone
  • Literary: A dry area with little rain.
  • Scientific: A region where the annual precipitation is less than the potential evaporation, characterized by low humidity and scarce vegetation.

6. Semi-Arid Zone
  • Literary: A region with slightly more rainfall than deserts.
  • Scientific: A climate zone receiving 250–500 mm of rainfall annually, intermediate between arid and humid conditions.

7. Alpha Diversity
  • Literary: A measure of how many different types of organisms are in a single area.
  • Scientific: The diversity of species within a specific habitat or ecosystem, commonly assessed using metrics like Shannon and Simpson indices.

8. Beta Diversity
  • Literary: A measure of how different two places are in terms of the organisms they have.
  • Scientific: The comparison of microbial community composition between two or more habitats or samples.

9. Phylum (plural: Phyla)
  • Literary: A group of related organisms within a kingdom.
  • Scientific: A high-level taxonomic rank below kingdom and above class, grouping organisms with similar body plans or characteristics.

10. Holobiont
  • Literary: A living organism and all the tiny organisms that live with it.
  • Scientific: A host organism and its associated microbiota considered as a single ecological unit.

11. Operational Taxonomic Unit (OTU)
  • Literary: A group of organisms considered the same based on their genetic similarity.
  • Scientific: A proxy for a species used in microbial ecology studies, typically clustered based on sequence similarity in genetic markers.

12. PERMANOVA (Permutational Multivariate Analysis of Variance)
  • Literary: A method to compare differences between groups.
  • Scientific: A statistical test to assess the significance of groupings in multidimensional data by permuting the dataset.

13. Principal Coordinate Analysis (PCoA)
  • Literary: A way to visualize how similar or different things are from each other.
  • Scientific: A method for visualizing the distances or dissimilarities between samples in a lower-dimensional space.

14. Heatmap
  • Literary: A colorful chart showing where something is more or less common.
  • Scientific: A graphical representation of data where values are represented by color, often used to show abundance or expression levels.

15. Actinobacteria
  • Literary: A group of bacteria often found in soil and helpful for plants.
  • Scientific: A phylum of Gram-positive bacteria with high G+C content, known for their role in decomposing organic material and producing antibiotics.

16. Proteobacteria
  • Literary: A big group of bacteria that live in many environments.
  • Scientific: A major phylum of Gram-negative bacteria, including many pathogens and nitrogen-fixing species.

17. Shannon Index
  • Literary: A measure of diversity that considers both the number of species and their abundance.
  • Scientific: A mathematical formula to calculate species diversity in a community, considering both richness and evenness.

18. Simpson Index
  • Literary: A number showing how likely it is to find the same type of organism twice in a row.
  • Scientific: A metric that measures the probability that two randomly chosen individuals belong to the same species.

19. Linear Discriminant Analysis Effect Size (LDA-LEfSe)
  • Literary: A method to find the most important differences between groups.
  • Scientific: A statistical tool used to identify biomarkers and features that are differentially abundant across groups in high-dimensional datasets.

20. Alpha Proteobacteria
  • Literary: A type of bacteria often living in close association with plants.
  • Scientific: A class within the Proteobacteria phylum, including many symbiotic and nitrogen-fixing species.


Last modified: Saturday, 21 December 2024, 4:46 PM