Elsevier

Pedosphere

Volume 29, Issue 1, February 2019, Pages 24-33
Pedosphere

Chronic Nitrogen Fertilization Modulates Competitive Interactions Among Microbial Ammonia Oxidizers in a Loess Soil

https://doi.org/10.1016/S1002-0160(18)60055-4Get rights and content

Abstract

Nitrogen (N) application may lead to niche segregation of soil ammonia-oxidizing archaea (AOA) and bacteria (AOB), thereby reducing the competitive interactions between AOA and AOB due to higher ammonium substrate availability. However, the adaptive mechanisms of AOA and AOB under N enrichment remain poorly understood. Stable isotope probing (SIP) microcosm incubation was employed to reveal community changes of active AOA and AOB in a loess soil from a field experiment growing potatoes that received no N (control, CK), low N (LN, 75 kg N ha−1), and high N (HN, 375 kg N ha−1). The results showed that the soil potential nitrification rate (PNR) was measured by culturing of the soil samples from the field experiment. Soil PNR was significantly increased in HN by 87.5% and 67.5% compared with CK and LN, respectively. Compared with CK, the 13C-amoA genes of soil AOA and AOB in HN had 2.58 × 104 and 1.55 × 106 copies, representing 1.6- and 16.2-fold increase respectively. It was indicated that AOB dominated soil ammonia oxidation. A phylogenetic analysis of the 13C-amoA gene showed that N application significantly increased the proportion of 54d9-like AOA up to 90% in HN, while the Nitrososphaera gargensis-like and Nitrososphaera viennensis-like AOA were inhibited and completely disappeared. Nitrogen application also resulted in the community shift of active AOB-dominant group from Nitrosospira briensis-like to Nitrosospira sp. TCH711-like. Our study provides compelling evidence for the emergence and maintenance of active nitrifying communities under the intensified N input to an agricultural ecosystem.

References (52)

  • M M Zhang et al.

    Time-dependent shifts in populations and activity of bacterial and archaeal ammonia oxidizers in response to liming in acidic soils

    Soil Biol Biochem

    (2017)
  • X Zhou et al.

    Effects of 44 years of chronic nitrogen fertilization on the soil nitrifying community of permanent grassland

    Soil Biol Biochem

    (2015)
  • D J Arp et al.

    Nitrifiers: More than 100 years from isolation to genome sequences

    Microbe

    (2006)
  • S T Bates et al.

    Examining the global distribution of dominant archaeal populations in soil

    ISME J

    (2011)
  • S A Q Burton et al.

    Autotrophic ammonia oxidation at low pH through urea hydrolysis

    Appl Environ Microbiol

    (2001)
  • Y L Chen et al.

    Abundance and community structure of ammonia-oxidizing Archaea and Bacteria in response to fertilization and mowing in a temperate steppe in Inner Mongolia

    FEMS Microbiol Ecol

    (2014)
  • H Y Chu et al.

    Community structure of ammonia-oxidizing bacteria under long-term application of mineral fertilizer and organic manure in a sandy loam soil

    Appl Environ Microbiol

    (2007)
  • H J Di et al.

    Nitrification driven by bacteria and not archaea in nitrogen-rich grassland soils

    Nat Geosci

    (2009)
  • T H Erguder et al.

    Environmental factors shaping the ecological niches of ammonia-oxidizing archaea

    FEMS Microbiol Rev

    (2009)
  • C A Francis et al.

    Ubiquity and diversity of ammonia-oxidizing archaea in water columns and sediments of the ocean

    Proc Natl Acad Sci USA

    (2005)
  • C Gubry-Rangin et al.

    Archaea rather than bacteria control nitrification in two agricultural acidic soils

    FEMS Microbiol Ecol

    (2010)
  • R Hatzenpichler et al.

    A moderately thermophilic ammonia-oxidizing crenarchaeote from a hot spring

    Proc Natl Acad Sci USA

    (2008)
  • J Z He et al.

    Quantitative analyses of the abundance and composition of ammonia-oxidizing bacteria and ammonia-oxidizing archaea of a Chinese upland red soil under long-term fertilization practices

    Environ Microbiol

    (2007)
  • J Z He et al.

    Advances in ammonia-oxidizing microorganisms and global nitrogen cycle

    Acta Ecol Sinica (in Chinese)

    (2009)
  • J Z He et al.

    Key processes and microbial mechanisms of soil nitrogen transformation

    Microbiol China (in Chinese)

    (2013)
  • H W Hu et al.

    Comammox—a newly discovered nitrification process in the terrestrial nitrogen cycle

    J Soils Sediments

    (2017)
  • Cited by (11)

    • Ammonia-oxidizing bacteria rather than ammonia-oxidizing archaea dominate nitrification in a nitrogen-fertilized calcareous soil

      2022, Science of the Total Environment
      Citation Excerpt :

      In addition, the standardized total effect revealed that N application rate had strong positive effect on PNR (Table S2), both the alpha and beta diversity of AOB played more important role in affecting PNR, but beta diversity of AOA had negative effect on PNR (Fig. 6B). The present study showed that PNR was increased with increasing N application rate (Fig. 1), which proved the hypothesis (i), and was consistent with previous studies on alkaline yellow dryland soil (Dong et al., 2019), alkaline fluvo-aquic and acidic black soils (Ullah et al., 2020). We also found that PNR was significantly related to certain edaphic factors (Table S1, Fig. 6), such as soil NO3− concentration observed in previous studies (Chu et al., 2007; Duan et al., 2019).

    View all citing articles on Scopus
    View full text