Exploration of Soil Functional Microbiomes—A Concept Proposal for Long-Term Fertilized Grasslands

Abstract

Exploring grassland microbiomes is a challenge in the current context of linking soil microorganism activity with the balance of these ecosystems. Microbiologists are constantly attempting to develop faster and lower-cost methods, and propose new and best-fitted indicators that will provide a more complex data analysis. A different concept was proposed for assessing functional microbiomes by splitting the functional ecological niche into complementary segments. The comparison with the upper and lower limits of the ecological niche provides a clearer image of community alterations due to long-term applied treatments. The method allows the extraction of the most sensitive and stable functional guilds, with the extraction of the most critical dominant–codominant functional groups in every segment of the functional niche. The resulting microbial functional–sociological model is ready to use on community-level physiological profile databases and also can be applied backward for vegetation analysis.

Soil Properties and Forest Decline in the North-Western Part of Romania

“…In the present experiment, microbial functional communities' analysis showed a variety of potential related to the analyzed sites, both in terms of functional guilds and functional groups. The analysis of functional guilds shows a combined response to site conditions in terms of similar functional activities, while the analysis of functional groups offers information related to a very specific function of the microbiome [31]. Both functional guilds and groups were analyzed for each site to detect significant differences through ANOVA and Duncan multiple comparison.…”

“…For each soil sample, Ecoplates (BIOLOG™) were used to analyze the communitylevel physiological profile [30,31]. The method has the advantage of both the high number of substrates (31 + 1) and the continuous recording of microbial activity up to a plateau phase [32].…”

“…In each well, a quantity of 150 µL of 10 −4 soil suspension was inoculated and incubated in the dark at 25 • C. The plate reading was performed continuously from 24 h until 120 h with a BioTek Epoch plate reader and an optical density of 590 nm. Average well color development (AWCD) and both Shannon and Simpson diversity indices were calculated [31][32][33] for each plate.…”

The Diversity of Arbuscular Mycorrhizal Fungi and Their Associations in South America: A Case Study of Argentinean and Brazilian Cattle Raising Productive Ecosystems: A Review

“…Grasslands present great ecological, economic, and social values [16] but continue to receive limited scientific attention. The microbiota associated with grassland vegetation was also under-investigated in the past time [40]; however, during the last five years, the interest in studying these plant-microbe interactions has been promoted [41][42][43][44][45][46]. Among the microbiota associated with the grassland plant species, the AMFs represent important components interconnecting soil and plants through the hyphal networks and secreted substances, such as glomalin, useful to the restoration and sustainability of these for these valuable ecosystems at risk [47].…”

Application of Biological Nanopore Sequencing Technology in the Detection of Microorganisms†

“…This approach can be combined with the concept of macro ecology to explain macroscopic characteristics such as the diversity and functional activity of microbial flora in the environment. [ 75 ] Consequently, it can more accurately reflect the real state of microbial survival than the study of microorganisms in a single genus.…”