Abstract
Microorganisms drive soil carbon mineralization and changes in their activity with increased temperature could feedback to climate change. Variation in microbial biodiversity and the temperature sensitivities (Q10) of individual taxa may explain differences in the Q10 of soil respiration, a possibility not previously examined due to methodological limitations. Here, we show phylogenetic and taxonomic variation in the Q10 of growth (5–35 °C) among soil bacteria from four sites, one from each of Arctic, boreal, temperate, and tropical biomes. Differences in the temperature sensitivities of taxa and the taxonomic composition of communities determined community-assembled bacterial growth Q10, which was strongly predictive of soil respiration Q10 within and across biomes. Our results suggest community-assembled traits of microbial taxa may enable enhanced prediction of carbon cycling feedbacks to climate change in ecosystems across the globe.
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Data availability
Soil respiration, microbial biomass, and figure data are available in the Supplementary materials. Raw sequence data for this study are available in Sequence Read Achieve (SRA) database of NCBI under accession numbers PRJNA649787, PRJNA649546, PRJNA649571, and PRJNA649802.
Code availability
Code associated with qSIP calculations is publicly available at https://bitbucket.org/QuantitativeSIP/qsip_repo.
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Program in Genomic Sciences (DE-SC0020172 and DE-SC0016207). Work at LLNL was performed under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract DE-AC52-07NA27344 and Awards SCW1590 and SCW1679. CW acknowledges the funding of Key Research Program of Frontier Sciences, CAS (ZDBS-LY-DQC019), Youth Innovation Promotion Association CAS to CW (2018231), and CAS scholarship.
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Experimental work was conceived by BAH, EMM, ES, KSH, JP-R, and SJB. Samples were collected and experiments performed by RLM, MH, MCM, JCM, SLB, SNM, BJK, BWS, AMP, SJB, KSH, EMM, and JP-R. CW and EMM analyzed the data, with null model analysis by JP and feedback from ES, PD, and BAH. The manuscript was written by CW and EMM with the contributions from all co-authors.
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Wang, C., Morrissey, E.M., Mau, R.L. et al. The temperature sensitivity of soil: microbial biodiversity, growth, and carbon mineralization. ISME J 15, 2738–2747 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41396-021-00959-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41396-021-00959-1
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