Unravelling the interplay of ecological processes shaping the bacterial rare biosphere

The microbial rare biosphere is characterized by the long-tail of low abundant taxa accounting for the skewed species abundance distribution of microbial communities. However, we lack a systematic understanding of how community assembly processes interplay in structuring the rare biosphere. Here, we partitioned rare components from overall community and investigated the spatiotemporal assembly of soil bacterial communities across a well-documented chronosequence spanning over a century of ecosystem development. We characterized the ‘active’ microbial common and rare biospheres by sequencing the reverse transcribed 16S rRNA from the soil microbial RNA.