Study of microbiome in bulk soil of a rare and endangered species, Firmiana danxiaensis. soil microbial community of Firmiana danxiaensis

Firmiana danxiaensis is an endangered species with narrow distribution that only survives on the Danxia landform. Even though the red lines that protected the species was established by government, little information related to the species was accessed by now. Microorganisms are considered as providing a second set of genomes of plants, which are critical to plant growth. The goal of this study is detecting the soil microbiome that may benefit to the plant growth in the surrounding soils of Firmiana danxiaensis. We measured soil chemical factors and used the high throughput sequencing to determined 16S and ITS of microbe DNA in the Firmiana danxiaensis and the Pinus massoniana soils. Here we carried out that comparing with the Pinus massoniana soils, pH, AN and Zn were much higher in the Firmiana danxiaensis soils. In microbial community, the Firmiana danxiaensis soils had higher bacterial diversity and fungal species than the Pinus massoniana soils. Consistently, the significantly large dissimilarity in microbial community was detected across the two plant soils, which was driven by soil properties including concentration of pH, SOC, TN, TP, TK, AN and Zn depending on canonical correlation analysis (CCA). Moreover, the predicted function of bacteria demonstrated that nitrogen metabolism, Cyanoamino acid metabolism and Chloroalkane and chloroalkane degradation were significantly lower in the Firmiana danxiaensis soils compared with the Pinus massoniana soils. In conclusion, our study suggested that soil microbiome was largely controlled by individual plant species and soil characteristics, and microbes assembly in the Firmiana danxiaensis soils may benefits to plant growth, through which was inoculated to develop a new strategy that protecting the threatened species.