Impact of Cd and hpyeraccumualtor rhizosphere on soil bacterial community

Understanding how biotic and abiotic factors govern the assembly of rhizosphere-microbial communities, is a long-standing goal in microbial ecology. In phytoremediation research, where plants are used to remediate heavy metal-contaminated soils, a deeper understanding of rhizosphere-microbial ecology is needed to fully exploit the potential of microbial-assisted phytoremediation.This study investigated whether Grime’s competitor/stress-tolerator/ruderal (CSR) theory could be used to describe the impact of cadmium (Cd) and the presence of a Cd-accumulating plant, Carpobrotus rossii (Haw.) Schwantes, on the assembly of soil-bacterial communities using illumina 16S rRNA profiling and the predictive metagenomic-profiling program, PICRUSt.