Comparison of the Structure of Soil Microbial Communities of Different Ecosystems Using the Microbiome Sequencing Approach

Abstract

In this study, we aimed to compare the functional and taxonomic composition of soil microbial communities in different ecosystems, agricultural, natural grasslands, and old-growth forests, in the context of different environmental conditions. In this research, cultivable microbial quantification was performed by conventional plate-count techniques using different selective media. The taxonomic structure of microbe communities was evaluated using NGS metagenomic sequencing on the Illumina platform NovaSeq. The taxonomic analysis showed that individual land uses are characterized by the specific structure of communities; some taxonomic groups are specific only to agricultural, grassland, or forest ecosystems. After determining the abundance of functional groups of culturable microorganisms by the conventional plate-count method, statistically significant quantitative differences in physiological groups between the individual ecosystems were revealed. The metagenomic analysis revealed that different ecosystems are characterized by specific taxonomic groups of microorganisms and that general alpha diversity varies among individual land-use samples. Since the most unstable soil systems are agricultural, they are likely to suffer the most and will suffer more in the future from climate change than natural ones.