Microbial community structure and functions are resilient to metal pollution along two forest soil gradients
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ABSTRACT: Despite the global importance of forests, it is virtually unknown how their soil microbial communities adapt at the phylogenetic and functional level to long term metal pollution. Studying twelve sites located along two distinct gradients of metal pollution in Southern Poland revealed that both community composition (via MiSeq Illumina sequencing of 16S rRNA genes) and functional gene potential (using GeoChip 4.2) were highly similar across the gradients despite drastically diverging metal contamination levels. Metal pollution level significantly impacted microbial community structure (p = 0.037), but not bacterial taxon richness. Metal pollution altered the relative abundance of specific bacterial taxa, including Acidobacteria, Actinobacteria, Bacteroidetes, Chloroflexi, Firmicutes, Planctomycetes and Proteobacteria. Also, a group of metal resistance genes showed significant correlations with metal concentrations in soil, although no clear impact of metal pollution levels on overall functional diversity and structure of microbial communities was observed. While screens of phylogenetic marker genes, such as 16S rRNA, provided only limited insight into resilience mechanisms, analysis of specific functional genes, e.g. involved in metal resistance, appeared to be a more promising strategy. This study showed that the effect of metal pollution on soil microbial communities was not straightforward, but could be filtered out from natural variation and habitat factors by multivariate statistical analysis and spatial sampling involving separate pollution gradients. 12 samples were collected from two long-term polluted areas (Olkusz and Miasteczko M-EM-^ZlM-DM-^Eskie) in Southern Poland. In the study presented here, a consecutively operated, well-defined cohort of 50 NSCLC cases, followed up more than five years, was used to acquire expression profiles of a total of 8,644 unique genes, leading to the successful construction of supervised
ORGANISM(S): uncultured bacterium
SUBMITTER: Hamed Azarbad
PROVIDER: E-GEOD-59620 | biostudies-arrayexpress |
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-arrayexpress
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