Soil microbial communities of three grassland ecosystems in the Bayinbuluke, China

The microbial community plays an important role in soil nutrient cycles and energy transformations in alpine grassland. In this study, we investigated the composition of soil microbial community collected from alpine cold swamp meadow (ASM), alpine cold meadow (AM), and alpine cold desert steppe (ADS) within the Bayinbuluke, China using Illumina amplicon sequencing. Of the 147,271 sequences obtained, 36 microbial phyla/groups were detected. The results showed that the ADS had lower microbial diversity than the ASM and AM, as estimated by the Shannon index. The Verrucomicrobia, Chloroflexi, Planctomycetes, Proteobacteria, and Actinobacteria were the predominant phyla in all three ecosystems. Particularly, Thaumarchaeota was only abundant in ASM, Bacteroidetes in AM, and Acidobacteria in ADS. Additionally, the predominant genus also differed with each ecosystem. Candidatus Nitrososphaera was predominant in ADS, the Pir4 lineage in ASM, and Sphingomonas in AM. Our results indicated that the soil microbial community structure were different for each grassland ecosystem in the Bayinbuluke.The accepted manuscript in pdf format is listed with the files at the bottom of this page. The presentation of the authors' names and (or) special characters in the title of the manuscript may differ slightly between what is listed on this page and what is listed in the pdf file of the accepted manuscript; that in the pdf file of the accepted manuscript is what was submitted by the author