environment Targeted loci environmental. soil metagenome

Food demand continuously increases in the context of fast shrinking of land and resources suitable for agriculture. Augment of biological fertility is promising to resolve this dilemma beyond the capacity of current agricultural practices mainly through physical and chemical manipulation. However, the potential and control of biological fertility remains largely unexplored. Here we integrated high-throughput sequencing with the classic reciprocal transplant approach to dissect the biological role of microbiome from its abiotic counterpart in four typical arable soils from contrasting climate regions spanning over 3000 km in China.