Gravesoil fungi are more sensitive than bacteria in response to precipitation

Highlights

● Fungi are more sensitive to precipitation than bacteria.

● The susceptibility of abundant and rare bacteria to precipitation has no difference.

● Abundant taxa of fungi are more vulnerable to precipitation than rare ones.

Abstract

Precipitation scenario alteration leads to grievous ecological consequences in ecosystems, especially on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau. Bacterial and fungal community and their abundant and rare taxa in soil ecosystems may respond differently to the changed precipitation. Therefore, more attention needs to be paid to the sensitivity of bacteria and fungi and their abundant and rare taxa to precipitation shifts. The responses of bacterial and fungal populations and their abundant and rare taxa concerning diversity, assembly, and interactions to manipulative changes of precipitation were explored via imitating no precipitation, little precipitation, and medium precipitation using 16S rRNA gene and ITS amplicon sequencing. The results indicated that the change rate of fungal Simpson diversity with precipitation was higher than that of bacteria. The slope of the modified stochasticity ratio (MST) value of fungi to precipitation was steeper than that of bacteria. The Simpson diversity and the MST value of abundant and rare taxa within bacteria had no difference with precipitation. In contrast, those of abundant taxa within fungi varied more than rare ones with precipitation. By unveiling the differential responses of microbial populations with discrepant characteristics, this study allowed us to understand the different microbial communities responding to rainfall on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau.

Graphical abstract

Keywords

Qinghai-Tibet Plateau / sensitivity / precipitation / assembly / co-occurrence networks

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Authors contributions

B.H and H.L led the drafting of the manuscript, with substantial input from the other authors. S.Z and H.L was responsible for funding acquisition. All authors have contributed to writing-review and editing.

Conflict of interest

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Consent for publication

All the authors agree to publish this paper.

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 42007026), Wanzhou Doctor Express Project (Grant No. wzstc-20220130).

Availability of data and materials

The soil fungal data were deposited at the NCBI Sequence Read Archive with accession number PRJNA879892.

Ethics approval and consent to participate

The animal processing in our study was approved by the Animal Welfare and Ethics Committee of North-west Institute of Plateau Biology, Chinese Academy of Sciences (NWIPB-201708**). The relevant experimental procedures adhered to the guidelines.

Electronic supplementary material

Supplementary material is available in the online version of this article at https://doi.org/10.1007/s42832-023-0225-z and is accessible for authorized users.

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