Contrasting soil microbial community functional structures in two major landscapes of the Tibetan alpine meadow

MicrobiologyOpen

Houjuan Chu⁴  Shiping Wang¹  Haowei Yue⁴  Qiaoyan Lin²  Yigang Hu²  Xiangzhen Li³  Jizhong Zhou⁴ 

[1] Laboratory of Alpine Ecology and Biodiversity, Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China;Key Laboratory of Adaption and Evolution of Plateau Biota, Northwest Institute of Plateau Biology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Xining, China;Chengdu Institute of Biology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Chengdu, China;State Key Joint Laboratory of Environment Simulation and Pollution Control, School of Environment, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China

关键词: Alpine grassland;    GeoChip;    soil microbial community;    Tibetan plateau;   

DOI  :  10.1002/mbo3.190

来源: Wiley

【 摘 要 】

Abstract

The grassland and shrubland are two major landscapes of the Tibetan alpine meadow, a region very sensitive to the impact of global warming and anthropogenic perturbation. Herein, we report a study showing that a majority of differences in soil microbial community functional structures, measured by a functional gene array named GeoChip 4.0, in two adjacent shrubland and grassland areas, were explainable by environmental properties, suggesting that the harsh environments in the alpine grassland rendered niche adaptation important. Furthermore, genes involved in labile carbon degradation were more abundant in the shrubland than those of the grassland but genes involved in recalcitrant carbon degradation were less abundant, which was conducive to long-term carbon storage and sequestration in the shrubland despite low soil organic carbon content. In addition, genes of anerobic nitrogen cycling processes such as denitrification and dissimilatory nitrogen reduction were more abundant, shifting soil nitrogen cycling toward ammonium biosynthesis and consequently leading to higher soil ammonium contents. We also noted higher abundances of stress genes responsive to nitrogen limitation and oxygen limitation, which might be attributed to low total nitrogen and higher water contents in the shrubland. Together, these results provide mechanistic knowledge about microbial linkages to soil carbon and nitrogen storage and potential consequences of vegetation shifts in the Tibetan alpine meadow.

【 授权许可】

CC BY   
© 2014 The Authors. MicrobiologyOpen published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.