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Rice biomass production and carbon cycling in 13CO2 pulse-labeled microcosms with different soils under submerged conditions

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Abstract

Aims

Rice fields are an important source for the greenhouse gas methane. Plants play an essential role in carbon supply for soil microbiota, but the influence of the microbial community on carbon cycling is not well understood.

Methods

Microcosms were prepared using sand-vermiculite amended with different soils and sediments, and planted with rice. The microcosms at different growth stages were pulse-labeled with 13CO2 followed by tracing 13C in plant, soil and atmospheric carbon pools and quantifying the abundance of methanogenic archaea in rhizosphere soil.

Results

Overall, >85 % of the freshly assimilated carbon was allocated in aboveground plant biomass, approximately 10 % was translocated into the roots and < 2 % was recovered in soil organic matter, independently from soil type. Only about 0.3 % was transformed to CH4, but emission of 13C-labeled CH4 started immediately and 13C enrichment revealed that plant-derived carbon was an important source for methanogenesis. The results further demonstrated that carbon assimilation and translocation processes, microbial abundance and gas emission were not only affected by the plant growth stage, but also by the content and type of soil in which the rice plants grew.

Conclusions

The study illustrates the close ties between plant physiology, soil properties and microbial communities for carbon turnover and ecosystem functioning.

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Acknowledgments

We thank Dr. Jennifer Pratscher (University of Warwick, Coventry, United Kingdom) for taking part in qPCR analysis and Philip Weyrauch (University of Münster, Germany) for performing gas measurements during soil incubation experiments. We are also grateful to Dr. Elisabetta Lupotto (CRA-RIS, Vercelli, Italy) for providing rice seeds, Prof. Dr. Peter Frenzel (Max Planck Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology, Marburg, Germany) for supplying Chinese paddy soil, and Dr. Quan Yuan (Max Planck Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology, Marburg, Germany) for critically reading of the manuscript. This research was supported by the Research Center for Synthetic Microbiology (‘Synmikro’) of the Landes-Offensive zur Entwicklung wissenschaftlich-ökonomischer Exzellenz (LOEWE) and the Max Planck Society.

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  1. Max Planck Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology, Karl-von-Frisch-Str. 10, 35043, Marburg, Germany

    Judith Pump & Ralf Conrad

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  1. Judith Pump
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Correspondence to Ralf Conrad.

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Pump, J., Conrad, R. Rice biomass production and carbon cycling in 13CO2 pulse-labeled microcosms with different soils under submerged conditions. Plant Soil 384, 213–229 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11104-014-2201-y

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