Effect of temperature on metabolic activity of intact microbial communities: Evidence for altered metabolic pathway activity but not for increased maintenance respiration and reduced carbon use efficiency

Lignin biochemistry and soil N determine crop residue decomposition and soil priming

“…The SUE of low-lignin litter is higher, resulting in proportionally less C respired, leaving a greater quantity of plant-derived C remaining. Substrates such as glucose can be used as efficiently as 73 % (Dijkstra et al 2011). In this study, the high lignin residues soybean and sunflower had the least residue-C remaining in all soils from greater respiration losses per unit C added compared to lower-lignin residues.…”

Microbial community structure mediates response of soil C decomposition to litter addition and warming

“…SOM models that include microbial community structure have shown that changes in microbial physiology, often expressed as CUE (defined as the amount of C in microbial biomass relative to C respired and in biomass), have the potential to dramatically impact the fate of C stocks to climate change (Allison et al, 2010;Schimel, 2013;Wieder et al, 2013;Li et al, 2014), and experimental evidence shows that CUE can be altered by substrate quality, temperature, and N availability (Dijkstra et al, 2011;Manzoni et al, 2012;Frey et al, 2013;Tucker et al, 2013). This concept of changes to CUE is of particular importance as a large portion of SOM has been attributed to microbial derived products, which may have a relatively long turnover time (Simpson et al, 2007;Liang and Balser, 2008;Miltner et al, 2012;Gleixner, 2013).…”

The effect of temperature and substrate quality on the carbon use efficiency of saprotrophic decomposition

“…The increased rate of maintenance respiration at higher temperatures is attributed to increases in the amount of energy required to maintain ion gradients across the cell membrane and to the increased rate of protein turnover (Farmer and Jones 1976;Hall and Cotner 2007;Mainzer and Hempfling 1976). Despite the general understanding of how CUE is affected by temperature, studies have demonstrated contradictive results, some studies showing a limited response to an increased temperature (Devevre and Horwath 2000;Dijkstra et al 2011b) while others have shown a decreased CUE with increased temperature (Devevre and Horwath 2000;Frey et al 2013;Steinweg et al 2008). The comparatively large amount of energy required to decompose molecularly complex constituents of OM may also have a greater overall impact on the CUE than the temperature (Dijkstra et al 2011b;Wetterstedt and Ågren 2011).…”