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.
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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Environmental selection overturns the decay relationship of soil prokaryotic community over geographic distance across grassland biotas
eLife 11:e70164.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.70164
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