TY - JOUR TI - Environmental selection overturns the decay relationship of soil prokaryotic community over geographic distance across grassland biotas AU - Zhang, Biao AU - Xue, Kai AU - Zhou, Shutong AU - Wang, Kui AU - Liu, Wenjing AU - Xu, Cong AU - Cui, Lizhen AU - Li, Linfeng AU - Ran, Qinwei AU - Wang, Zongsong AU - Hu, Ronghai AU - Hao, Yanbin AU - Cui, Xiaoyong AU - Wang, Yanfen A2 - Donoso, David A2 - Weigel, Detlef A2 - Deng, Ye VL - 11 PY - 2022 DA - 2022/01/24 SP - e70164 C1 - eLife 2022;11:e70164 DO - 10.7554/eLife.70164 UR - https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.70164 AB - Though being fundamental to global diversity distribution, little is known about the geographic pattern of soil microorganisms across different biotas on a large scale. Here, we investigated soil prokaryotic communities from Chinese northern grasslands on a scale up to 4000 km in both alpine and temperate biotas. Prokaryotic similarities increased over geographic distance after tipping points of 1760–1920 km, generating a significant U-shape pattern. Such pattern was likely due to decreased disparities in environmental heterogeneity over geographic distance when across biotas, supported by three lines of evidences: (1) prokaryotic similarities still decreased with the environmental distance, (2) environmental selection dominated prokaryotic assembly, and (3) short-term environmental heterogeneity followed the U-shape pattern spatially, especially attributed to dissolved nutrients. In sum, these results demonstrate that environmental selection overwhelmed the geographic ‘distance’ effect when across biotas, overturning the previously well-accepted geographic pattern for microbes on a large scale. KW - prokaryote KW - distance-decay KW - U-shape KW - grassland KW - biota KW - microbial community JF - eLife SN - 2050-084X PB - eLife Sciences Publications, Ltd ER -