Microbial communities from Southern African dryland soils: 16S rRNA, fungal ITS and shotgun metagenomics

In this study we evaluated how edaphic microbial communities assemble and potentially function under contrasted poly-extreme conditions (arid vs hyperarid / saline vs non-saline) in two drylands located in South Africa National Parks, the arid Namaqua NP and the hyperarid Richtersveld NP, using metabarcoding and shotgun sequencing. Surface soil samples were collected at three individual and distant (>5km) sites in each dryland. At each site, four true replicates of plant-free soil were sterilely collected (n = 12 per dryland). The extracted mDNA was sent for amplicon (n = 24; 12 per dryland) and shotgun (n = 2; 1 per dryland) sequencing. Our results show that the fungal communities were significantly influenced by aridity and salinity, while the bacterial and archaeal one only by salinity. The microbial communities from the hyperarid and the saline soils presented very similar potential functional and stress response capacities.