Bacterial diversity of bryophyte-dominant biological soil crusts and associated mites

Development of bacterial communities in biological soil crusts along a revegetation chronosequence in the Tengger Desert, northwest China

“…Actinobacteria and Proteobacteria are usually predicted to be copiotrophic groups which increase in high-C environments (Fierer et al, 2007). These results differ from those reported in BSCs from Oman and the Gurbantunggut Desert (Abed et al, 2010;Moquin et al, 2012;Zhang et al, 2016), and even from BSCs of natural vegetation at the edge of the Tengger Desert (Wang et al, 2015), where Proteobacteria were the most abundant phylum, followed by Cyanobacteria, Actinobacteria and Chloroflexi. Unexpectedly, Cyanobacteria had a high proportion in the developed BSCs, although they were prevalent in early successional stages of BSCs (5YR) and play crucial roles in initial crust development (Belnap and Lange, 2001).…”

“…This is relatively similar to that in the natural habitat around the Tengger Desert, where Cyanobacteria (19.5 %) and Actinobacteria (19.4 %) were the most dominant phyla after Proteobacteria (25.0 %). Moreover, the results did not resemble those from arid Arizona soils (Dunbar et al, 1999) or the Gurbantunggut Desert (Zhang et al, 2016) due to the high proportion of Chloroflexi, an unexplained presence of thermophilic phyla (Gundlapally and Garcia-Pichel, 2006;Moquin et al, 2012;Nagy et al, 2005) that display good adaptation to drought conditions and the important roles in the development of BSCs in arid zones (Lacap et al, 2011;Wang et al, 2015). MS,5YR,15YR,28YR,34YR and 51YR represent mobile sand,respectively. …”

“…There are primary successional stages for BSCs in desert ecosystems: mobile sand, algal crust, lichen crust and moss crust (Lan et al, 2012a;Liu et al, 2006). The different successional stages of BSCs vary in their ecological function (Belnap, 2006;Bowker et al, 2006b;Li, 2012;Moquin et al, 2012).…”

“…They can decompose organic material and release nutrients, mediating geochemical processes necessary for ecosystem functioning in the persistence of BSCs (Balser and Firestone, 2005). Species composition and community structure of bacteria change greatly during the successional process of BSCs (Gundlapally et al, 2006;Moquin et al, 2012;Zhang et al, 2016). Most research on prokaryotic diversity of BSCs has focused on cyanobacteriadominated biocrusts in arid and semiarid regions (Abed et al, 2010;Garcia-Pichel et al, 2001;Nagy et al, 2005;Steven et al, 2013;Yeager et al, 2004).…”

Bacteria and Non-lichenized Fungi Within Biological Soil Crusts

“…Community profiling techniques such as denaturing gradient gel electrophoresis (DGGE) and terminal restriction fragment length polymorphism (T-RFLP) were initially used [for bacteria, see Garcia-Pichel et al (2001), Kuske et al (2002), Garcia-Pichel et al (2003), Yeager et al (2004), Nagy et al (2005), Gundlapally and Garcia-Pichel (2006), and Castillo-Monroy et al (2011); for fungi, see Bates and Garcia-Pichel (2009) and Bates et al (2012)]. Furthermore, 16S ribosomal RNA (rRNA) gene clone libraries were applied [for bacteria, see Yeager et al (2004), Gundlapally and Garcia-Pichel (2006), Yeager et al (2007), Abed et al (2010), and Moquin et al (2012); for bacteria and fungi, see Steven et al (2014)]. With the improvement of sequencing technologies such as highthroughput 16S rRNA gene sequence analyses and shotgun metagenome sequencing, there has been a resurgent interest in a wider characterization of the biocrust microbial communities (Steven et al 2012a(Steven et al , b, 2013a(Steven et al , b, 2014Angel and Conrad 2013;Davies et al 2013;Büdel et al 2014;Elliott et al 2014;Steven et al 2015).…”