Environmental selection overturns the decay relationship of soil prokaryotic community over geographic distance across grassland biotas
Abstract
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 4,000 km in both alpine and temperate biotas. Prokaryotic similarities increased over geographic distance after tipping points of 1,760 - 1,920 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.
Data availability
Sequencing data has been deposited in the NCBI Sequence Read Archive under accession number: PRJNA 729210
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
Chinese Academy of Sciences (Strategic Priority Research and Program A,20050104)
- Yanfen Wang
National Natural Science Foundation of China (42041005)
- Kai Xue
Ministry of Science and Technology of the People's Republic of China (The Second Tibetan Plateau Scientific Expedition and Research (STEP) program,2019QZKK0304)
- Yanfen Wang
Chinese Academy of Sciences (Strategic Priority Research Program A,XDA1907304)
- Yanfen Wang
Chinese Academy of Sciences (Strategic Priority Research Program B,XDB15010201)
- Yanfen Wang
Chinese Academy of Sciences (Light of West China)
- Kai Xue
Chinese Academy of Sciences (Sanjiangyuan National Park Joint Program,LHZX-2020-02-01)
- Yanfen Wang
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Reviewing Editor
- David Donoso, Escuela Politécnica Nacional, Ecuador
Version history
- Received: May 7, 2021
- Preprint posted: May 14, 2021 (view preprint)
- Accepted: January 21, 2022
- Accepted Manuscript published: January 24, 2022 (version 1)
- Version of Record published: February 9, 2022 (version 2)
Copyright
© 2022, Zhang et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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