soil microbial of archived samples

Many precious soils are currently stored in various soil archives across the world, and most of these valuable archived soils are air dried and deposited in sealed bottles at ambient temperature. However, skepticism regarding whether the archived soils could be used for studying the spatial distribution of microbial diversity remains. We collected archived soil samples from long-term field experimental stations of the Chinese Ecosystem Research Network, and performed high-throughput sequencing of the 16S rRNA genes. The results showed that both the total bacterial communities and the rare bacterial subcommunities were distinctly clustered into different groups corresponding toeach experimental station, and that analogous distribution patterns of bacterial communities existed between each two sampling years for both the total and the rare taxa,though the microbial community composition changed over time for all the stations, highlighting the great value of archived soils in revealing the spatial distribution patterns of microbial communities at large spatial scale.