Consistent responses of soil microbial taxonomic and functional attributes to mercury pollution across China Microbiome

The ecological consequences of mercury (Hg) pollution—one of the major pollutants worldwide—on microbial taxonomic and functional attributes remain poorly understood and largely unexplored. Using soils from two typical Hg-impacted regions across China, here, we evaluated the role of Hg pollution in regulating bacterial abundance, diversity, and co-occurrence network. We also investigated the associations between Hg contents and the relative abundance of microbial functional genes by analyzing the soil metagenomes from a subset of those sites.