Exploring ecological effects of arsenic and cadmium combined exposure on cropland soil: from multilevel organisms to soil functioning by multi-omics coupled with high-throughput quantitative PCR

Forest-to-Cropland Conversion Reshapes Microbial Hierarchical Interactions and Degrades Ecosystem Multifunctionality at a National Scale

“…The finding that the cropland-declined microbial cluster drove the degradation of soil ecosystem multifunctionality (Figure b) made sense because the biodiversity of certain microbial clusters, rather than that of the overall microbial communities, were found to significantly correlate with ecosystem multifunctionality. − In the present study, the cropland-declined microbial cluster was positively associated with various ecological processes related with nutrient (e.g., carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, and sulfur) cycles (Figure S11), probably because it contained a variety of taxa capable of improving soil nutrient status (Figures b and S11, and Table S5). Among the prokaryotes within the cropland-declined microbial cluster, the most abundant taxon Rhodoplanes genus was reported to be involved in nitrogen fixation; and Candidatus Solibacter genus was found to participate in the acquisition of carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus from soils. − We further took Rhizobiales order that the Rhodoplanes genus belonged to as a typical microbial functional population participating in nitrogen fixation and found it indeed significantly and positively ( P = 0.001, R 2 = 0.15) correlated with the normalized abundance of nifH gene (encoding dinitrogenase reductase during nitrogen fixation, Table S2).…”