How Soil Types Affect Fungal nirK-Containing Communities?----Chinese Academy of Sciences

How Soil Types Affect Fungal nirK-Containing Communities?

Apr 25, 2019

Denitrification is important in soil nitrogen transformation and can cause nitrogen loss. Previous studies mainly focused on the bacterial denitrification. Fungal denitrifiers also play important roles in soil nitrogen cycling, however, how the soil types affect the communities of fungi denitrifiers (nirK) is still unclear.

Researchers from the Institute of Subtropical Agriculture (ISA) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences investigated the abundance and composition of fungal nirK-containing denitrifiers across different climate zones in China, including quaternary red clay soils (QRC), alluvial soils (AS), and black soils (BS).

The team mainly used the real-time PCR and High throughput sequencing methods to detect the fungi nirK gene abundance and composition in the three different soils.

They found that the abundance of fungal nirK-containing denitrifiers exhibited significant difference among three soil types. Their results indicated that the composition of fungal nirK-containing denitrifiers were mainly distributed in the order of Mucorales, Hypocreales, Sordariale and Eurotiales, and the dominant order was Hypocreales.

It is interesting that the composition of fungal nirK-containing denitrifiers was highly homogenous among the soil types, which could be a consequence of enduring agricultural practices.

They also used a substrate-induced inhibition approach to explore N₂O emissions from fungal denitrification, and they found that QRC showed the highest N₂O emission by fungal denitrification with 66.17%, which was followed by the BS soils with 53.34%. However, the lowest, with approximately 18.62%, occurred in the AS soils.

Furthermore, the team found that the abundance of fungal nirK-containing denitrifiers, rather than their composition, may play more significant roles in relation to N₂O emission from fungal denitrification.

This study, published in Frontiers in Microbiology, was supported by the Chinese Academy of Sciences Strategic Leading Science and Technology Projects and the National Research Foundation of China.