Study of climate influence on natural microbial communities using global metagenome database

Abstract

To predict the microbial response and adaptation to environmental changes, it is crucial to study the community assembly process of natural soil communities. However, understanding the factors that drive soil microbial community structure depends on research dimensions and study scales. Only few studies have been conducted to compare community’s assembly process in a gradient environmental factor over a wide scale. Metagenomic DNA sequencing technology has provided huge amounts of available data which could be analyzed both functionally and taxonomically with numeric ecological methods. Here, we applied statistical models to 249 metagenomic datasets in a global scale to study the impact of key climate factors on microbial community structure. We have found that annual precipitation and precipitation seasonality are the of most important factors dominating the microbial communities’ functional structure and species composition. Also, our result supported that niche theory rule the community assembly process of natural soil communities in global scale.

Date of Award	27 Sept 2022
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Bristol
Supervisor	Gary Barker (Supervisor) & Tom Williams (Supervisor)