soil metagenome Metagenome. soil metagenome

Soil microbial communities play a non-negligible role in the primary succession, soil formation and biogeochemical cycling in terrestrial ecosystem as well as affecting plant productivity and diversity. It is not fully understood for the spatial structure and the biogeographical patterns of soil microbial communities and the important roles of soil microbial communities, especially in compassion to the aboveground plant community, which formed a relatively obvious and predictable trajectory in species diversity and composition. Therefore, it is necessary for microbial ecologists to understand the successional trajectories and predict the driving factors of microbial community changes in environment undergoing primary succession. In this context, both soil bacterial and fungal communities in the well-characterized Hailuogou Glacier Chronosequence were investigated by using a barcoded Illumina Miseq approach of bacterial and fungal ribosomal markers to test the following hypotheses: (1) the distributions and diversity of bacterial and fungal communities differ in the successional stages of the Hailuogou Glacier chronosequence as a result of different properties of the habitat (e.g. soil nutrient status and plants colonization); (2) different successional stages would select for different bacterial and fungal taxa as its central bacterial populations that can mirror the aboveground plants succession; (3) the major contributor to the bacterial and fungal community variation was different in the environmental factors.