Early colonizers of new soil habitats represent a minority of the soil bacterial community:. motility

In order to understand (re-)colonization of microhabitats and bacterial succession in soil, it is important to understand which bacterial members of soil microbial communities are most motile in the porous soil matrix. To address this issue, we carried out a series of experiments in sterilized soil microcosms.The expansion of bacterial populations within the community was assayed by quantitative PCR and pyrosequencing of 16S rRNA gene fragments.