The Archaeal community diversity changing with soil moisture gradient in Tibetan Plateau soils

Changes in the soil microbial community structure in space and time are very informative, but less studies touched the biogeography of archaeal community in a continental scale. Bacterial communities were strongly determined by soil C:N ratio in Tibetan Plateau soils discovered in our previous study. Here, with 16SrRNA archaeal primer, we fully comprehensive analyses the archaeal communities of 94 Tibetan soils. Finally we found that the Thaumarchaeota (95.87%) and Halobacteria (2.54%) were the dominant phylum across the all soils, accounting for more than 98% of the archaeal sequences of each soils. The results strongly demonstrated that local soil moisture was, directly or indirectly shaping the archaeal community structure (r= 0.31, P < 0.001). However, archaeal diversity had no relation with plant diversity but the community composition differed by vegetation type. Moreover, compare to bacterial diversity, no closely correlation were encountered. Our results suggested that, the control of environmental factors on soil archaeal community were different from bacterial community in the Tibetan Plateau, but similarly, local environmental variables were playing important role in shaping archaeal community.