Soil microbiology articles from across Nature Portfolio

The authors study microbial communities in hydrothermally heated, subseafloor sediment layers. They find that microbial abundance and diversity decrease with sediment depth and temperature, and provide evidence for the existence of a specialized deep, hot biosphere.

This study uses high-throughput chromosome conformation capture (Hi-C) to identify phage–host relationships in soil. By coupling Hi-C with DNA and RNA sequencing, the authors demonstrate the impact of soil drying on phage–host interactions and the downstream effects on abundances and interspecies interactions within bacterial communities.

Engineering ammonium excretion diazotrophs suffers from severe penalties to the bacteria. Here, the authors utilize a thermo-sensitive glutamine synthetase-based regulatory switch that permits diurnal changes in diazotrophic lifestyle, coincident with seasonal temperatures for cereal cultivation.

Bacterial functional diversity does not necessarily correlate with taxonomic diversity because average genome size may vary by community. Here, Wang et al. investigate bacterial communities along a natural pH gradient in forest soils, and find that average genome size and functional diversity decrease, whereas taxonomic diversity increases, as soil pH rises from acid to neutral.

In this study, Liu et al. demonstrate that the T7SS of the rhizobacterium Bacillus velezensis SQR9 and its effector protein YukE cause iron leakage in plant roots to support root colonization.

This study set out to increase our understanding of how viruses might mediate responses of microbial communities to climate warming.

Khan et al. show that mycelial nutrients can promote bacterial biodegradation of hexachlorocyclohexane pesticide in nutrient-deprived habitats.

Two studies report how soil microbiota adapts after wildfires and soil warming.

This study shows that plants recruit root bacteria that can protect them from drought.