Community structure and distribution of culturable bacteria in soil along an altitudinal gradient of Tianshan Mountains, China

Abstract

The Tianshan Mountains hold important and complex ecosystems. They host some unique biological resources, especially some microbes that have very crucial application values. In this study, the composition and distribution of bacterial communities from soil at different elevations of the Tianshan Mountains, China, were investigated using culture-based and molecular-based methods. The relationship between the abundance of culturable bacteria and environmental factors was also analysed. A total of 121 isolates showing different phenotypic characteristics were obtained from soil and identified by 16S rRNA gene sequencing analysis. All strains were assigned to four phyla: Proteobacteria, Actinobacteria, Bacteroidetes and Firmicutes. Actinobacteria and Proteobacteria were the dominating bacterial phyla; Arthrobacter, Pseudomonas and Sphingomonas were the most prevalent genera. The community structures of culturable bacteria were significantly different at different elevations, there being some common bacterial communities and some unique groups at each altitude. The principal component analysis (PCA) showed that the abundance of culturable bacterial communities has a significant positive correlation with the NO 3 ¡ content in the soil. It indicated that NO 3 ¡ was a better predictor of soil culturable bacterial abundance in this region. The strains isolated from alpine soil in this study are not only an invaluable part of microbial diversity, but also good candidates for further elucidating the interaction relationship between plants and microorganisms.

Co‐ordinated elevational diversity patterns for soil bacteria, fungi, and plants in alkaline soils of arid northwestern China

“…The contribution of soil (soil pH, AP and NO 3 À -N), plant (H plant and R plant ), and climatic (MAP and MAT) characteristics explained 6.69, 2.70, and 1.51%, respectively, of fungal community changes. Steep elevation gradients along with high variability in climatic conditions result in remarkable plant distribution patterns in arid-montane ecosystems (Chen et al, 2016;Jia et al, 2016; Y. T. Zhao et al, 2018). The results of this study demonstrated co-ordinated alpha and beta diversity patterns for soil microbes and plants along the elevational gradient in the arid-montane ecosystem:…”

“…The unique climate and ecological gradients make it an optimal environment to investigate microbial elevational patterns and the underlying assembly mechanisms. Thus far, only a bacterial diversity study has been conducted in Tianshan Mountains, another typical mountain range in arid northwestern China (Y. T. Zhao et al, 2018). Furthermore, global climate change has already resulted in an increase in temperature in this area of about 0.29 C per decade since the 1960s (Lin et al, 2017).…”

Investigation of an Elevational Gradient Reveals Strong Differences Between Bacterial and Eukaryotic Communities Coinhabiting Nepenthes Phytotelmata

“…The extent to which microbes follow the same macroecological trends established in plants and animals (macro-organisms or "macrobes") remains partially unresolved. One major line of thought on microbial macroecology is the Baas-Becking hypothesis: "everything is everywhere, and the environment selects", suggesting that bacteria are not dispersal-limited and thus not subject to the broad-scale spatial structuring seen in macrobes [7][8][9][10][11][12]. However, this view is controversial [13][14][15][16][17], and may not apply to eukaryotic microbes [18,19].…”

“…Microbes have not been as extensively studied in the context of elevational gradients, but the past decade has seen an increasing number of studies examining elevational patterns of bacteria in soil [6,[8][9][10][11][12][20][21][22] and to a lesser extent, aquatic habitats [23][24][25][26]. Similar studies have also been conducted for fungi [27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35] and protists [18,[36][37][38][39].…”

Elucidation of microbial diversity and lignocellulolytic enzymes for the degradation of lignocellulosic biomass in the forest soils of Eastern and Western Ghats of Tamil Nadu, India

“…In particular, the abundance of Actinobacteria and Proteobacteria has been widely reported, with limited variations according to climate differences and specific niches. 55 This study reveals that the two soil samples A and B exhibited an abundance of Proteobacteria. Soil bacteria are known for the breakdown of phenolic compounds such as lignin.…”