Soil organisms are a crucial part of the terrestrial biosphere. Despite their importance for ecosystem functioning, no quantitative, spatially-explicit models of the active belowground community currently exist. In particular, nematodes are the most abundant animals on Earth, filling all trophic levels in the soil food web. Here, we use 6,579 georeferenced samples to generate a mechanistic understanding of the patterns of global soil nematode abundance and functional group composition. The resulting maps show that 4.4 ± 0.64  10 20 nematodes (total biomass ~0.3 Gt) inhabit surface soils across the world, with higher abundances in sub-arctic regions (38% of total), than in temperate (24%), or tropical regions (21%). Regional variations in these global trends also provide insights into local patterns of soil fertility and functioning. These high-resolution models provide the first steps towards representing soil ecological processes into global biogeochemical models, to predict elemental cycling under current and future climate scenarios.

Ataxia-telangiectasia (A-T) is a genetic disorder associated with high incidence of B cell lymphoma. Using an A-T mouse model, we compared lymphoma incidence in several isogenic mouse colonies harboring different bacterial communities, finding that intestinal microbiota are a major contributor to disease penetrance and latency, lifespan, molecular oxidative stress and systemic leucocyte genotoxicity. High throughput sequence analysis of rRNA genes identified mucosa-associated bacterial phylotypes that were colony-specific. Lactobacillus johnsonii, which was deficient in the more cancer-prone mouse colony, was causally tested for its capacity to confer reduced genotoxicity when restored by short-term oral transfer. This intervention decreased systemic genotoxicity, a response associated with reduced basal leucocytes and the cytokine-mediated inflammatory state, and mechanistically linked to the host cell biology of systemic genotoxicity. Our results suggest that intestinal microbiota are a potentially modifiable trait for translational intervention in individuals at risk for B cell lymphoma, or for other diseases that are driven by genotoxicity or the molecular response to oxidative stress.

BackgroundReplant disease often occurs when certain crops are “replanted” in a soil that had previously supported the same or similar plant species. This disease typically leads to reductions in plant growth, crop yields, and production duration, and its etiology remains ill-defined. The objective of this study was to identify microorganisms associated with peach replant disease symptoms at a field location in California, USA. Soil samples were subjected to treatments to create various levels of replant disease symptoms. Clonal peach seedlings were grown in the treated soils in greenhouse trials. After 6 weeks, plant growth parameters were measured, and both culture and culture-independent analyses were performed to identify root-associated bacteria, fungi and stramenopiles.ResultsA total of 295,785 bacterial operational taxonomic units (OTU) were identified by an Illumina-based, high throughput sequence analysis of rRNA genes. Among the 60 most abundant OTUs, 27 showed significant (P<0.05) negative correlation with peach shoot weights while 10 were positively correlated. Most of these OTUs belonged to the bacterial phylum Proteobacteria (96%), including the classes Gammaproteobacteria (44.4%), Betaproteobacteria (33.3%) and Alphaproteobacteria (22.2%), and the orders Pseudomonadales, Burkholderiales, Chromatiales, Rhodocyclales, and Sphingomonadales. The most abundant fungi were Trichoderma asperellum, Trichoderma virens, Fusarium oxysporum, Ceratocystis fimbriata and Fusarium solani. The most abundant stramenopiles were Pythium vexans, Pythium violae and an unidentified Aplanochytrium species. Validation experiments using sequence-selective quantitative PCR analyses identified negative and positive associations between P. vexans and Trichoderma spp. and peach shoot weights, respectively.ConclusionsThis study identified numerous microorganisms associated with peach replant symptoms, some of which have been previously identified while others represent new candidates. Subsequent Koch's postulates investigations will assess their possible roles in this replant disease.