Project description:Land cover change has long been recognized that marked effect the amount of soil organic carbon. However, little is known about microbial-mediated effect processes and mechanism on soil organic carbon. In this study, the soil samples in a degenerated succession from alpine meadow to alpine steppe meadow in Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau degenerated, were analyzed by using GeoChip functional gene arrays.
Project description:Soil microorganisms act as gatekeepers for soil-atmosphere carbon exchange by balancing the accumulation and release of soil organic matter. However, poor understanding of the mechanisms responsible hinders the development of effective land management strategies to enhance soil carbon storage. Here we empirically test the link between microbial ecophysiological traits and topsoil carbon content across geographically distributed soils and land use contrasts. We discovered distinct pH-controls on microbial mechanisms of carbon accumulation. Land use intensification in low-pH soils that increased pH above a threshold (~ 6.2) lead to carbon loss through increased decomposition following alleviation of acid-retardation of microbial growth. However, loss of carbon with intensification in near neutral-pH soils was linked to decreased microbial biomass and reduced growth efficiency that was, in turn, related to tradeoffs with stress alleviation and resource acquisition. Thus, less intensive management practices in near neutral-pH soils have more potential for carbon storage through increased microbial growth efficiency; whereas, in acidic soils microbial growth is a bigger constraint on decomposition rates.
Project description:Herein, we evaluated the changes in biological functions in soils across global biomes through the identification and quantification of proteins. This knowledge is essential to provide one stepforward in soil microbial ecology in order to decipher the cellular and molecular mechanisms employed by soil microbial communities to adapt to their environment and to explain the potential responses of microbial communities, and their microbially-driven ecosystem services, to global change and land use. Our study aims to provide the most comprehensive assessment on the structure and function of the topsoil metaproteome across global biomes, and hence provide direct identification of the most domimant protein-encoded functions in terrestrial ecosystems.
Project description:Soil microbial community is a complex blackbox that requires a multi-conceptual approach (Hultman et al., 2015; Bastida et al., 2016). Most methods focus on evaluating total microbial community and fail to determine its active fraction (Blagodatskaya & Kuzyakov 2013). This issue has ecological consequences since the behavior of the active community is more important (or even essential) and can be different to that of the total community. The sensitivity of the active microbial community can be considered as a biological mechanism that regulates the functional responses of soil against direct (i.e. forest management) and indirect (i.e. climate change) human-induced alterations. Indeed, it has been highglihted that the diversity of the active community (analyzed by metaproteomics) is more connected to soil functionality than the that of the total community (analyzed by 16S rRNA gene and ITS sequencing) (Bastida et al., 2016). Recently, the increasing application of soil metaproteomics is providing unprecedented, in-depth characterisation of the composition and functionality of active microbial communities and overall, allowing deeper insights into terrestrial microbial ecology (Chourey et al., 2012; Bastida et al., 2015, 2016; Keiblinger et al., 2016). Here, we predict the responsiveness of the soil microbial community to forest management in a climate change scenario. Particularly, we aim: i) to evaluate the impacts of 6-years of induced drought on the diversity, biomass and activity of the microbial community in a semiarid forest ecocosystem; and ii) to discriminate if forest management (thinning) influences the resistance of the microbial community against induced drought. Furthermore, we aim to ascertain if the functional diversity of each phylum is a trait that can be used to predict changes in microbial abundance and ecosystem functioning.
Project description:Soil transplant serves as a proxy to simulate climate change in realistic climate regimes. Here, we assessed the effects of climate warming and cooling on soil microbial communities, which are key drivers in Earth’s biogeochemical cycles, four years after soil transplant over large transects from northern (N site) to central (NC site) and southern China (NS site) and vice versa. Four years after soil transplant, soil nitrogen components, microbial biomass, community phylogenetic and functional structures were altered. Microbial functional diversity, measured by a metagenomic tool named GeoChip, and phylogenetic diversity are increased with temperature, while microbial biomass were similar or decreased. Nevertheless, the effects of climate change was overridden by maize cropping, underscoring the need to disentangle them in research. Mantel tests and canonical correspondence analysis (CCA) demonstrated that vegetation, climatic factors (e.g., temperature and precipitation), soil nitrogen components and CO2 efflux were significantly correlated to the microbial community composition. Further investigation unveiled strong correlations between carbon cycling genes and CO2 efflux in bare soil but not cropped soil, and between nitrogen cycling genes and nitrification, which provides mechanistic understanding of these microbe-mediated processes and empowers an interesting possibility of incorporating bacterial gene abundance in greenhouse gas emission modeling.
Project description:Soil transplant serves as a proxy to simulate climate change in realistic climate regimes. Here, we assessed the effects of climate warming and cooling on soil microbial communities, which are key drivers in EarthM-bM-^@M-^Ys biogeochemical cycles, four years after soil transplant over large transects from northern (N site) to central (NC site) and southern China (NS site) and vice versa. Four years after soil transplant, soil nitrogen components, microbial biomass, community phylogenetic and functional structures were altered. Microbial functional diversity, measured by a metagenomic tool named GeoChip, and phylogenetic diversity are increased with temperature, while microbial biomass were similar or decreased. Nevertheless, the effects of climate change was overridden by maize cropping, underscoring the need to disentangle them in research. Mantel tests and canonical correspondence analysis (CCA) demonstrated that vegetation, climatic factors (e.g., temperature and precipitation), soil nitrogen components and CO2 efflux were significantly correlated to the microbial community composition. Further investigation unveiled strong correlations between carbon cycling genes and CO2 efflux in bare soil but not cropped soil, and between nitrogen cycling genes and nitrification, which provides mechanistic understanding of these microbe-mediated processes and empowers an interesting possibility of incorporating bacterial gene abundance in greenhouse gas emission modeling. Fifty four samples were collected from three soil types (Phaeozem,Cambisol,Acrisol) in three sites (Hailun, Fengqiu and Yingtan) along a latitude with reciprocal transplant; Both with and without maize cropping in each site; Three replicates in every treatments.
Project description:Structure and assembly processes of soil bacterial communities under different land use at karst areas remained poorly understood to date. To address this issue, soil samples from arable land and pristine forest over a karst cave, located in the acid rain impacted area, Hubei province, were collected and subjected to high-throughput sequencing and multivariate statistical analysis.
| OEX011159 | NODE
Project description:Land-use change affects microbial community composition and function
Project description:The fate of the carbon stocked in permafrost soils following global warming and permafrost thaw is of major concern in view of the potential for increased CH4 and CO2 emissions from these soils. Complex carbon compound degradation and greenhouse gas emissions are due to soil microbial communities, but their composition and functional potential in permafrost soils are largely unknown. Here, a 2 m deep permafrost and its overlying active layer soil were subjected to metagenome sequencing, quantitative PCR, and microarray analyses. The active layer soil and 2 m permafrost soil microbial community structures were very similar, with Actinobacteria being the dominant phylum. The two soils also possessed a highly similar spectrum of functional genes, especially when compared to other already published metagenomes. Key genes related to methane generation, methane oxidation and organic matter degradation were highly diverse for both soils in the metagenomic libraries and some (e.g. pmoA) showed relatively high abundance in qPCR assays. Genes related to nitrogen fixation and ammonia oxidation, which could have important roles following climatic change in these nitrogen-limited environments, showed low diversity but high abundance. The 2 m permafrost soil showed lower abundance and diversity for all the assessed genes and taxa. Experimental biases were also evaluated and showed that the whole community genome amplification technique used caused large representational biases in the metagenomic libraries. This study described for the first time the detailed functional potential of permafrost-affected soils and detected several genes and microorganisms that could have crucial importance following permafrost thaw. A 2m deep permafrost sample and it overlying active layer were sampled and their metagenome analysed. For microarray analyses, 8 other soil samples from the same region were used for comparison purposes.