Microbial community from archived soil samples

Air-dried soil samples have been tested? by TRFLP or DGGE or qPCR method to explore the species relative abundance in response to environmental shift in some case study. The soils samples investigated/examined/tested were usually at local scale and single/limited time point and could provide only limited microbial information as the techniques like DGGE or TRFLP could harvest far less data than high-throughput sequencing to depict the rare species which plays an important role in the total community. However, at large spatial scale and systematic/long-term time series, it was still unknown how much extent air-dried soils could be used/utilized/applied to reveal microbial biogeography pattern, especially the rare species composition. Therefore, archived soils sampled at regional scale (eight long-term field experimental stations of the Chinese Ecosystem Research Network,were analyzed using high-throughput sequencing.