Effects of salinity and soil aggregates sizes on soil microbial community structure.

There are 1 billion hectares land with saline soil in the word, which is a serious problem. Whereas, there are few studies researching the correlation between salinity, aggregates sizes and microbial community structure. The current study had an insight into the effects of soil salinity and aggregates sizes on microbial community structure. Moreover, pH, TN, TC, MBC and other environmental factors also played important roles in microbial community structure with the combined effects of salinity and aggregates sizes. The microbial community had significant differences of nitrogen metabolism, sulfur metabolism, carbohydrate metabolism and signal transduction genes abundance, which were predicted by KEGG metabolic pathways on the effect of soil aggregates sizes and salinity.