Climate change is predicted to have a significant effect on the grasslands of the United States and will be detrimental to the economy and environment. The changing precipitation levels would also have an effect on the structural and functional potential of associated soil microbiome communities, which in turn will regulate the health of the plants during stressful conditions. In this study, we applied the metagenomics analyses to capture the responses that the bacterial populations would use in drier soil conditions.
Results/Conclusions
We collected soil from two sites (dry and wet) at the Konza Long-Term Ecological Research field station in Kansas, which had characteristic features of the native prairies. Soil drying had a significant shift in bacterial population at the community level. Following that, 15 bacterial genomes were short-listed based on the availability in the public database, and based on their higher relative abundance in dry soils than in wet. The potential microbial mechanisms were elucidated when an in-depth analysis of the functional genes were performed. Genes like Translation elongation factor EF-Tu, Thiamine biosynthesis protein, and Catalase were identified as a part of the overall stress functional responses in the bacterial population under study. We speculate that these identified bacterial populations are important for maintaining the health of the soil. Genes and/or pathways found in this study provide insights into microbial mechanisms that these bacterial populations might employ to resist challenging drought conditions.