Project description:Microbially induced calcium carbonate precipitation (MICP) holds potential for soil stabilization and carbon sequestration efforts. While the biogeochemical pathways and enzymes driving MICP are known, the microbial metabolic networks and community dynamics underlying such processes remain poorly characterized. To address this gap, we interrogated a MICP-capable four-member consortium of soil bacteria termed carbon storing consortium - A (CSC-A). Prior work shows that CSC-A yields carbonate at a higher quantity compared to the sum of carbonate individually produced by each member, suggesting MICP is driven by consortium dynamics.Thus, we applied a multi-omic integration approach of genomics, transcriptomics, and metabolomics to investigate potential inter-species interactions that may influence the MICP phenotype. Genomic life history characterizations identified evidence of specialization by two members, while metatranscriptomic perturbation suggested that R. qingshengii is a keystone species when grown in urea, a key molecule to the MICP process. By comparing individual species’ metabolomes to the metabolic profile of a shared well, we identified over 200 metabolites predicted to be produced or consumed by CSC-A. Integrating both data types and mapping them to the KEGG reactome highlighted over 20 different enriched pathways with reactions related to glutamate metabolism, succinate metabolism, and branched chain amino acid biosynthesis. As succinate metabolism was a major node in this network we applied laboratory assays to confirm that succinate led to increased carbonate precipitation by CSC-A, a critical validation of our modeling approach. By isolating and identifying the interconnected metabolic components underlying MICP in CSC-A, we identified keystone taxa, metabolites, and pathways important for future optimization of the application of this consortium to carbonate precipitation.
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:<p>Carbonate-type saline-alkaline stress severely constrains maize production; however, the synergistic response mechanisms between rhizosphere microorganisms and metabolites remain unclear. This study focused on maize fields in the carbonate chernozem region of the Songnen Plain in Northeast China. Through field experiments and the integration of soil chemical factor analysis, microbial high-throughput sequencing (16S rRNA and ITS), and non-targeted metabolomics (LC-MS), we systematically investigated the response mechanisms of the rhizosphere micro-ecosystem under saline-alkaline stress. The results indicated that saline-alkaline stress significantly increased soil pH and electrical conductivity (EC), and led to decreases in soil organic matter (SOM), total nitrogen (TN), and total phosphorus (TP) contents. However, the rhizosphere zone exhibited a certain buffering capacity, maintaining a higher cation exchange capacity (CEC). Microbial community analysis revealed that bacterial alpha diversity increased under stress. In contrast, fungal diversity significantly decreased, and the community structure shifted towards a pathogen-dominated community, primarily within Ascomycota, especially the genus Fusarium. Co-occurrence network analysis further revealed that saline-alkaline conditions enhanced the complexity and connectivity of bacterial networks but led to the contraction and structural simplification of fungal networks. Metabolite analysis showed that saline-alkaline stress induced significant reprogramming of the rhizosphere metabolic profile. Organophosphorus compounds, nucleotides, and their analogs were significantly enriched, while defensive secondary metabolites such as Cajanol specifically accumulated in the saline-alkaline rhizosphere. Pathway analysis indicated the activation of stress resistance and oxidative stress mitigation-related pathways, including Betalain biosynthesis, flavonoid biosynthesis, tryptophan metabolism, and arginine metabolism. Multi-omics integration analysis identified soil EC and total potassium (TK) as key environmental factors driving the differentiation of microbial and metabolite communities. Key differential metabolites showed significant positive correlations with saline-alkaline-enriched microbial taxa (e.g., Sphingomonas), revealing a metabolite-mediated microbial recruitment mechanism. This study, through multi-omics analysis, discovered that the maize rhizosphere, under saline-alkaline stress, undergoes metabolic reprogramming (e.g., enriching defensive metabolites like Cajanol) to directionally recruit beneficial bacteria such as Sphingomonas and maintains higher bacterial network complexity, while also leading to the pathologization of the fungal community. Our study reveals that maize recruits beneficial microbes via rhizosphere metabolic reprogramming, providing a mechanistic basis for microbiome-assisted saline-alkaline soil remediation.</p>
Project description:The oxalate-carbonate Pathway (OCP) refers to the biotransformation process of soil Oxalate degradation and coupled Carbonate formation. It is of great significance to explore this complex biotransformation process to improve the suitable rhizosphere environment and promote soil carbon cycle. A strain of oxalate degrading bacteria, Spirillum OX-1, was isolated from soil.
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 EarthM-bM-^@M-^Ys 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. Fifty four samples were collected from three soil types (Phaeozem,Cambisol,Acrisol) in three sites (Hailun, Fengqiu and Yingtan) along a latitude with reciprocal transplant; Both with and without maize cropping in each site; Three replicates in every treatments.
Project description:The response of soil microbial community to climate warming through both function shift and composition reorganization may profoundly influence global nutrient cycles, leading to potential significant carbon release from the terrain to the atmosphere. Despite the observed carbon flux change in northern permafrost, it remains unclear how soil microbial community contributes to this ecosystem alteration. Here, we applied microarray-based GeoChip 4.0 to investigate the functional and compositional response of subsurface (15~25cm) soil microbial community under about one year’s artificial heating (+2°C) in the Carbon in Permafrost Experimental Heating Research site on Alaska’s moist acidic tundra. Statistical analyses of GeoChip signal intensities showed significant microbial function shift in AK samples. Detrended correspondence analysis and dissimilarity tests (MRPP and ANOSIM) indicated significant functional structure difference between the warmed and the control communities. ANOVA revealed that 60% of the 70 detected individual genes in carbon, nitrogen, phosphorous and sulfur cyclings were substantially increased (p<0.05) by heating. 18 out of 33 detected carbon degradation genes were more abundant in warming samples in AK site, regardless of the discrepancy of labile or recalcitrant C, indicating a high temperature sensitivity of carbon degradation genes in rich carbon pool environment. These results demonstrated a rapid response of northern permafrost soil microbial community to warming. Considering the large carbon storage in northern permafrost region, microbial activity in this region may cause dramatic positive feedback to climate change, which is important and necessary to be integrated into climate change models.
Project description:Aeolian soil erosion, exacerbated by anthropogenic perturbations, has become one of the most alarming processes of land degradation and desertification. By contrast, dust deposition might confer a potential fertilization effect. To examine how they affect topsoil microbial community, we conducted a study GeoChip techniques in a semiarid grassland of Inner Mongolia, China. We found that microbial communities were significantly (P<0.039) altered and most of microbial functional genes associated with carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium cycling were decreased or remained unaltered in relative abundance by both erosion and deposition, which might be attributed to acceleration of organic matter mineralization by the breakdown of aggregates during dust transport and deposition. As a result, there were strong correlations between microbial carbon and nitrogen cycling genes. amyA genes encoding alpha-amylases were significantly (P=0.01) increased by soil deposition, reflecting changes of carbon profiles. Consistently, plant abundance, total nitrogen and total organic carbon were correlated with functional gene composition, revealing the importance of environmental nutrients to soil microbial function potentials. Collectively, our results identified microbial indicator species and functional genes of aeolian soil transfer, and demonstrated that functional genes had higher susceptibility to environmental nutrients than taxonomy. Given the ecological importance of aeolian soil transfer, knowledge gained here are crucial for assessing microbe-mediated nutrient cyclings and human health hazard.
2015-03-28 | GSE67347 | GEO
Project description:Microbially induced calcium carbonate precipitation in paleo accretions