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Archaeal contribution to carbon-functional composition and abundance in China’s coastal wetlands: Not to be underestimated

Frontiers in Microbiology 2022 10 citations ? Citation count from OpenAlex, updated daily. May differ slightly from the publisher's own count. Score: 35 ? 0–100 AI score estimating relevance to the microplastics field. Papers below 30 are filtered from public browse.
Meiling Yang, Na Liu, Baoli Wang, Yajun Li, Jianfeng Li, Cong‐Qiang Liu

Summary

Researchers investigated microbial diversity and carbon-functional gene composition across twenty coastal wetlands along China's coast, finding that archaeal rather than bacterial communities dominate carbon-functional gene composition and that Nanoarchaeaeota is the key archaeal phylum driving carbon cycling in anoxic sediments.

Microbial diversity, together with carbon function, plays a key role in driving the wetland carbon cycle; however, the composition, driving factors of carbon-functional genes and the relationship with microbial community have not been well characterized in coastal wetlands. To understand these concerns, microbes, carbon-functional genes, and related environmental factors were investigated in twenty wetlands along China's coast. The results indicate that carbon-functional gene composition is dominated by archaeal rather than bacterial community and that Nanoarchaeaeota is the dominant archaeal phylum associated with carbon cycling in anoxic sediments. Compared with microbes, carbon-functional composition was more stable because they showed the highest Shannon diversity and archaeal functional redundancy. Deterministic processes dominated microbial community, and stochastic processes were more important for carbon-functional genes. Labile Fe governed archaeal and carbon-functional composition by coupling with nitrogen and carbon biogeochemical cycles, while bacterial community was affected by NH4-N and SOC/SON. This study highlights the predominant contributions of archaea to carbon-functional genes and to the stability of carbon-functional composition, thus providing new insights into the microbial dominance of the carbon cycle and the evaluation of carbon function in coastal wetlands.

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