Project description:Evaluation of different strategies to interpret metaproteomics data acquired on soil samples from a floodplain along the Seine River (France) incorporating sample-specific metagenomics data, soil genome catalogue database, and generic sequence database.
Project description:We investigated the toxicity of soil samples derived from a former municipal landfill site in the South of the Netherlands, where a bioremediation project is running aiming at reusing the site for recreation. Both an organic soil extract and the original soil sample was investigated using the ISO standardised Folsomia soil ecotoxicological testing and gene expression analysis. The 28 day survival/reproduction test revealed that the ecologically more relevant original soil sample was more toxic than the organic soil extract. Microarray analysis showed that the more toxic soil samples induced gene regulatory changes in twice as less genes compared to the soil extract. Consequently gene regulatory changes were highly dependent on sample type, and were to a lesser extent caused by exposure level. An important biological process shared among the two sample types was the detoxification pathway for xenobiotics (biotransformation I, II and III) suggesting a link between compound type and observed adverse effects. Finally, we were able to retrieve a selected group of genes that show highly significant dose-dependent gene expression and thus were tightly linked with adverse effects on reproduction. Expression of four cytochrome P450 genes showed highest correlation values with reproduction, and maybe promising genetic markers for soil quality. However, a more elaborate set of environmental soil samples is needed to validate the correlation between gene expression induction and adverse phenotypic effects.
Project description:The present invention relates to methods for determining soil quality, and especially soil pollution, using the invertebrate soil organism Folsomia candida also designated as springtail. Specifically, the present invention relates to a method for determining soil quality comprising: contacting Folsomia Candida with a soil sample to be analysed during a time period of 1 to 5 days; isolating said soil contacted Folsomia Candida; extracting RNA from said isolated soil contacted Folsomia Candida; determing a gene expression profile based on said extracted RNA using microarray technology; comparing said gene expression profile with a reference gene expression profile; and determing soil quality based expression level differences between said gene expression profile and said control expression profile.
Project description:Soil transplant serves as a proxy to simulate climate change in realistic climate regimes. Here, we assessed the effects of climate warming and cooling on soil microbial communities, which are key drivers in Earth’s biogeochemical cycles, four years after soil transplant over large transects from northern (N site) to central (NC site) and southern China (NS site) and vice versa. Four years after soil transplant, soil nitrogen components, microbial biomass, community phylogenetic and functional structures were altered. Microbial functional diversity, measured by a metagenomic tool named GeoChip, and phylogenetic diversity are increased with temperature, while microbial biomass were similar or decreased. Nevertheless, the effects of climate change was overridden by maize cropping, underscoring the need to disentangle them in research. Mantel tests and canonical correspondence analysis (CCA) demonstrated that vegetation, climatic factors (e.g., temperature and precipitation), soil nitrogen components and CO2 efflux were significantly correlated to the microbial community composition. Further investigation unveiled strong correlations between carbon cycling genes and CO2 efflux in bare soil but not cropped soil, and between nitrogen cycling genes and nitrification, which provides mechanistic understanding of these microbe-mediated processes and empowers an interesting possibility of incorporating bacterial gene abundance in greenhouse gas emission modeling.
Project description:Because of severe abiotic limitations, Antarctic soils represent simplified ecosystems, where microorganisms are the principle drivers of nutrient cycling. This relative simplicity makes these ecosystems particularly vulnerable to perturbations, like global warming, and the Antarctic Peninsula is among the most rapidly warming regions on the planet. However, the consequences of the ongoing warming of Antarctica on microorganisms and the processes they mediate are unknown. Here, using 16S rRNA gene pyrosequencing and qPCR, we report a number of highly consistent changes in microbial community structure and abundance across very disparate sub-Antarctic and Antarctic environments following three years of experimental field warming (+ 0.5-2°C). Specifically, we found significant increases in the abundance of fungi and bacteria and in the Alphaproteobacteria-to-Acidobacteria ratio. These alterations were linked to a significant increase in soil respiration. Furthermore, the shifts toward generalist or opportunistic bacterial communities following warming weakened the linkage between bacterial diversity and functional diversity. Warming also increased the abundance of some organisms related to the N-cycle, detected as an increase in the relative abundance of nitrogenase genes via GeoChip microarray analyses. Our results demonstrate that soil microorganisms across a range of sub-Antarctic and Antarctic environments can respond consistently and rapidly to increasing temperatures, thereby potentially disrupting soil functioning.
Project description:To know whether the microarray technique could be used to detect bacterial gene expression in soil, large quantity of RNA was extracted from soil cultures of Pseudomonas putida KT2440 containing a chloroaromatic degrading plasmid at the presence or absence of the growth substrate, 3-chlorobenzoate (3CB). The quality and quantity of the extracted RNA were proper for a typical microarray analysis. Gene expression patterns of soil cultures were analyzed by DNA microarray using the extracted RNA. Among 5346 genes on the array, 5% and 4.5% of genes showed up- or down-regulation. Analysis done at the DAVID Bioinformatics Resources server suggested that the benzoate degradation via hydroxylation pathway had the most significant changes after treatment with 3CB. Expression of the 3CB degradation genes located in the genome was confirmed by real-time RT-PCR. In addition, real time RT-PCR analysis revealed that the fluorescent signals from plasmid genes on the microarray were saturated so that the induction ratio of the genes located in the plasmid was underestimated in microarray analysis. To our best knowledge, this report represents the first trial to use microarray technique to detect genome-wide bacterial gene expression in soil.
Project description:Despite the global importance of forests, it is virtually unknown how their soil microbial communities adapt at the phylogenetic and functional level to long term metal pollution. Studying twelve sites located along two distinct gradients of metal pollution in Southern Poland revealed that both community composition (via MiSeq Illumina sequencing of 16S rRNA genes) and functional gene potential (using GeoChip 4.2) were highly similar across the gradients despite drastically diverging metal contamination levels. Metal pollution level significantly impacted microbial community structure (p = 0.037), but not bacterial taxon richness. Metal pollution altered the relative abundance of specific bacterial taxa, including Acidobacteria, Actinobacteria, Bacteroidetes, Chloroflexi, Firmicutes, Planctomycetes and Proteobacteria. Also, a group of metal resistance genes showed significant correlations with metal concentrations in soil, although no clear impact of metal pollution levels on overall functional diversity and structure of microbial communities was observed. While screens of phylogenetic marker genes, such as 16S rRNA, provided only limited insight into resilience mechanisms, analysis of specific functional genes, e.g. involved in metal resistance, appeared to be a more promising strategy. This study showed that the effect of metal pollution on soil microbial communities was not straightforward, but could be filtered out from natural variation and habitat factors by multivariate statistical analysis and spatial sampling involving separate pollution gradients.
Project description:To know whether the microarray technique could be used to detect bacterial gene expression in soil, large quantity of RNA was extracted from soil cultures of Pseudomonas putida KT2440 containing a chloroaromatic degrading plasmid at the presence or absence of the growth substrate, 3-chlorobenzoate (3CB). The quality and quantity of the extracted RNA were proper for a typical microarray analysis. Gene expression patterns of soil cultures were analyzed by DNA microarray using the extracted RNA. Among 5346 genes on the array, 5% and 4.5% of genes showed up- or down-regulation. Analysis done at the DAVID Bioinformatics Resources server suggested that the benzoate degradation via hydroxylation pathway had the most significant changes after treatment with 3CB. Expression of the 3CB degradation genes located in the genome was confirmed by real-time RT-PCR. In addition, real time RT-PCR analysis revealed that the fluorescent signals from plasmid genes on the microarray were saturated so that the induction ratio of the genes located in the plasmid was underestimated in microarray analysis. To our best knowledge, this report represents the first trial to use microarray technique to detect genome-wide bacterial gene expression in soil. A study using total RNA extracted from soil cultures of Pseudomonas putida KT2440/pSL1. Each chip measures the expression level of 5,341 genes from Pseudomonas putida KT2440 genome and 5 genes from an introduced plasmid pSL1 with fourteen 60-mer probes per gene which have five-fold technical redundancy.