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Diversity of prokaryotes associated with soils around coal-fire gas vents in MaNasi county of Xinjiang, China

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Abstract

Bacterial and archaeal diversity in surface soils of three coal-fire vents was investigated by T-RFLP analysis and clone libraries of 16S rRNA genes. Soil analysis showed that underground coal fires significantly influenced soil pH, moisture and NO3 − content but had little effect on other elements, organic matter and available nutrients. Hierarchical cluster analysis showed that bacterial community patterns in the soils were very similar, but abundance varied with geographic distance. A clone library from one soil showed that the bacterial community was mainly composed of Firmicutes, Proteobacteria, Acidobacteria, Bacteroidetes, Planctomycetes, Actinobacteria, and unidentified groups. Of these, Firmicutes was the most abundant, accounting for 71.4 % of the clones, and was mainly represented by the genera Bacillus and Paenibacillus. Archaeal phylotypes were closely related to uncultivated species of the phyla Crenarchaeota (97.9 % of clones) and Thaumarchaeota (2.1 %). About 28 % of archaeal phylotypes were associated with ammonia oxidization, especially phylotypes that were highly related to a novel, ammonia-oxidizing isolate from the phylum Thaumarchaeota. These results suggested that microbial communities in the soils were diverse and might contain a large number of novel cultivable species with the potential to assimilate materials by heterotrophic metabolism at high temperature.

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Acknowledgments

The authors gratefully acknowledge the financial Supported by the Science & Technology Supporting plan of the science and technology department of Xinjiang (201232121) and the Natural science foundation of Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region (2012211B48) and the Open Project of the Key Lab of Microorganisms in Xinjiang Specific Environment (XJYS0203-2011-02 and XJYS0203-2011-03).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Xingjian Laboratory of Special Environmental Microbiology, Urumqi, 830091, China

    Tao Zhang, Jianhua Xu & Jun Zeng

  2. Institute of Microbiology, Xinjiang Academy of Agriculture Science, No. 403, NanChang Road, Urumqi, Xinjiang, China

    Kai Lou

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  1. Tao Zhang
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  2. Jianhua Xu
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Correspondence to Kai Lou.

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Zhang, T., Xu, J., Zeng, J. et al. Diversity of prokaryotes associated with soils around coal-fire gas vents in MaNasi county of Xinjiang, China. Antonie van Leeuwenhoek 103, 23–36 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10482-012-9782-3

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