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Quantitative analyses of the abundance and composition of ammonia-oxidizing bacteria and ammonia-oxidizing archaea of a Chinese upland red soil under long-term fertilization practices
- Ji-zheng He, Ju-pei Shen, Li-mei Zhang, Yong-guan Zhu, Yuan-ming Zheng, Ming-gang Xu, Hongjie Di,
- Original article citation: Environ Microbiol 9," 2364 - 2374, (2007).
- Categories: Ecology & Evolution, Earth & Environment, and Cell & Molecular Biology
- Recommended by: James Moir on 01/18/2008 03:59AM GMT
- Reasons for recommending:
Nitrification, the process of conversion of ammonium to nitrate in the soil is a microbial process which is fundamentally important for nitrogen cycling in the terrestrial ecosystem. It also has environmental and economic implications as the process produces nitrate which can be leached and contaminate groundwater and surface waters. The leaching of nitrate also reduces the efficiency of nitrogen for plant growth. However, the microbes involved in performing the nitrification process are poorly understood mainly because of difficulties of studying them using conventional techniques. The latest advances in molecular techniques and real-time PCR have provided new approaches to studying the abundance and diversity of these microbes. To this end, the publication of the paper by Jizheng He et al., titled, Quantitative analyses of the abundance and composition of ammonia-oxidizing bacteria and ammonia-oxidizing archaea of a Chinese upland red soil under long-term fertilization practices Published in Environmental Microbiology (2007) 9(9): 2364-2374 represents a major milestone in this area using the latest molecular techniques to study these ammonium oxidizing microbes. This work makes major advances in this subject area by providing quantitative information on the relative abundance and diversity of the ammonium oxidizing bacteria and archaea in soils that had been under long-term fertilizer applications. These research findings provide important insights into the role that these different microbes play in nitrification and the impact of human activities on the population abundance and diversity of these microbes. These findings have implications on the sustainable management of terrestrial ecosystems. I therefore would strongly recommend the paper for the website of Nature China as I am confident that many researchers around China and the world would find it an interesting and important paper.
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This paper confirmed the findings by Leininger et al. (2006, Nature) that AOA were more abundant than AOB in all the corresponding treatments of the red soil. Significant positive correlations were observed among the population sizes of AOB and AOA, soil pH and potential nitrification rates, indicating that both AOB and AOA played an important role in ammonia oxidation in the soil. More importantly, for the first time, it observed that the AOA community composition had more sensitive response to the long-term fertilization treatments than the AOB did. These findings could be fundamental to improve our understanding of the importance of both AOB and AOA in the cycling of nitrogen and other nutrients in terrestrial ecosystems.
This study uses advanced molecular techniques to elucidate the relative abundance and diversity of ammonia-oxidizing archaea and bacteria under long-term fertilization regime. The findings in this study will arouse potentially a reappraisal of the relative importance of ammonia-oxidizing archaea and bacteria in soil nitrogen cycle.
Archaea maybe play a very important role in terrestrial ecosystems such as soil. In this study, the authors found that the abundance of ammonia-oxidizing archaea (AOA) was significant higher than bacteria via real-time PCR methods. Given the importance of ammonia oxidizers in the soil nitrogen cycle, thus He et al. will promote the further attention and study on soil AOA.
In recent year, the important role of archaea in the soil become interesting topic in the world. However the mechanism is unclear now. This paper gives us a fine prospect of it. In this paper, the authors use molecular method and especially the real-time PCR first time to elucidate that the AOA is more abundant than AOB in all fertilization treatments. The result not only offers the hope of AOA research but also the suggestion on the fertilization management.