Abstract. Including information about soil microbial communities
into global decomposition models is critical for predicting and
understanding how ecosystem functions may shift in response to global
change. Here we combined a standardised litter bag method for estimating
decomposition rates, the Tea Bag Index (TBI), with high-throughput sequencing of
the microbial communities colonising the plant litter in the bags. Together
with students of the Federal College for Viticulture and Fruit
Growing, Klosterneuburg, Austria, acting as citizen scientists, we used this
approach to investigate the diversity of prokaryotes and fungi-colonising
recalcitrant (rooibos) and labile (green tea) plant litter buried in three
different soil types and during four seasons with the aim of (i) comparing
litter decomposition (decomposition rates (k) and stabilisation factors (S))
between soil types and seasons, (ii) comparing the microbial communities
colonising labile and recalcitrant plant litter between soil types and
seasons, and (iii) correlating microbial diversity and taxa relative abundance
patterns of colonisers with litter decomposition rates (k) and stabilisation
factors (S). Stabilisation factor (S), but not decomposition rate (k),
correlated with the season and was significantly lower in the summer,
indicating a decomposition of a larger fraction of the organic material
during the warm months. This finding highlights the necessity to include
colder seasons in the efforts of determining decomposition dynamics in order
to quantify nutrient cycling in soils accurately. With our approach, we
further showed selective colonisation of plant litter by fungal and
prokaryotic taxa sourced from the soil. The community structures of these
microbial colonisers differed most profoundly between summer and winter, and
selective enrichment of microbial orders on either rooibos or green tea
hinted at indicator taxa specialised for the primary degradation of
recalcitrant or labile organic matter, respectively. Our results
collectively demonstrate the importance of analysing decomposition dynamics
over multiple seasons and further testify to the potential of the
microbiome-resolved TBI to identify the active component of the microbial
community associated with litter decomposition. This work demonstrates the power of the microbiome-resolved TBI to give a
holistic description of the litter decomposition process in soils.
We studied the effect of drinking of low mineralized water containing 8 mg/liter Ca2+ on blood pressure and content of brain proteins in synaptosomes of SHR and WKY rats. Blood pressure increased in WKY rats, but not in SHR rats. In SHR rats, Ca2+ deficit reduced the content of GAP-43 protein and induced the appearance of its fragment GAP-43-3 in brain synaptosomes. In WKY rats, the content of this protein did not change, and its fragment GAP-43-3 was absent. No structural changes in BASP1 protein were found.
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