4.7 Article

Long-term warming in a Mediterranean-type grassland affects soil bacterial functional potential but not bacterial taxonomic composition

Journal

NPJ BIOFILMS AND MICROBIOMES
Volume 7, Issue 1, Pages -

Publisher

NATURE PORTFOLIO
DOI: 10.1038/s41522-021-00187-7

Keywords

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Funding

  1. Second Tibetan Plateau Scientific Expedition and Research (STEP) program [2019QZKK0503]
  2. National Natural Science Foundation of China [41825016, 41877048]
  3. Office of Biological and Environmental Research, Office of Science, in the US Department of Energy [DE-AC05-00OR22725]
  4. Oak Ridge National Laboratory
  5. US NSF [DEB-0092642/0445324]
  6. Packard Foundation
  7. Morgan Family Foundation
  8. French CNRS/INSU - EC2CO Program (project INTERACT)

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Long-term, moderate warming did not affect the taxonomic composition of soil microbial communities, but altered the functional gene compositions. Genes associated with labile carbon degradation increased in relative abundance in the warming treatment, while those related to nitrogen cycling decreased. These results suggest that microbial functional potentials are more sensitive to long-term moderate warming than the taxonomic composition of microbial communities.
Climate warming is known to impact ecosystem composition and functioning. However, it remains largely unclear how soil microbial communities respond to long-term, moderate warming. In this study, we used Illumina sequencing and microarrays (GeoChip 5.0) to analyze taxonomic and functional gene compositions of the soil microbial community after 14 years of warming (at 0.8-1.0 degrees C for 10 years and then 1.5-2.0 degrees C for 4 years) in a Californian grassland. Long-term warming had no detectable effect on the taxonomic composition of soil bacterial community, nor on any plant or abiotic soil variables. In contrast, functional gene compositions differed between warming and control for bacterial, archaeal, and fungal communities. Functional genes associated with labile carbon (C) degradation increased in relative abundance in the warming treatment, whereas those associated with recalcitrant C degradation decreased. A number of functional genes associated with nitrogen (N) cycling (e.g., denitrifying genes encoding nitrate-, nitrite-, and nitrous oxidereductases) decreased, whereas nifH gene encoding nitrogenase increased in the warming treatment. These results suggest that microbial functional potentials are more sensitive to long-term moderate warming than the taxonomic composition of microbial community.

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