Unraveling community adaption and survival strategy of soil microbiome under vanadium stress in nationwide mining environments

The vanadium (V) smelters soil harbor wide ranges of microorganisms, whose survival relies on their metabolic activities under stress. Nonetheless, the characteristics and functions of soil microbiome in V mining environments have not been recognized at a continental scale. This study investigates microbial diversity, community assembly and metabolic traits of soil microbiome across 90 V smelters in China. A decrease in alpha diversity is observed, along with community variation, which is also jointly explained by other environmental, climatic and geographic factors. Null model shows that V promotes homogeneous selection. V also mediates co-occurrence patterns, with increased positive interspecific associations under higher V concentrations (＞559.6 mg/kg), e.g., f_Gemmatimonadaceae, Nocardioides, Micromonospora, Rubrobacter. In addition, 67 metagenome assembled genomes are retrieved via metagenomic analysis. The metabolic pathways of keystone taxa are disentangled to reveal their putati...