Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain
the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in
Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles
and JavaScript.
Soil microbiology is the scientific discipline that is concerned with the study of all biological aspects of the microorganisms (bacteria, archaea, viruses, fungi, parasites and protozoa) that exist in the soil environment. This is a subdiscipline of environmental microbiology.
The expansion and intensification of agriculture has led to a loss of soil carbon. Here the authors show that increasing plant diversity within an agricultural soil increases positive associations within the soil microbial community, which increases carbon use efficiency.
A soil history of constant oxygen exposure enhances N2O reduction rates under anoxia compared to a history of long or short anoxic pulses, highlighting the importance of knowing the oxygen legacy of a soil for accurate N2O emission predictions.
This study analyzes a global dataset of soil metagenomes to explore environmental drivers of growth potential, a fundamental aspect of bacterial life history. The authors show that growth potential, estimated from codon usage statistics, was highest in forested biomes and lowest in arid latitudes, which indicates that bacterial productivity generally reflects ecosystem productivity globally.
Viruses can infect all domains of life and must therefore be considered as key regulators of ecological interactions that span from microorganisms to higher trophic levels.
The vast stores of high-latitude peatland carbon are thought to be resistant to microbial degradation, but a multi-omics investigation suggests this might not be the case.
Decomposer microbiomes are universal across cadavers regardless of environmental conditions, and they use complex cross-feeding and interkingdom interactions to break down organic matter.
In this study, Liu et al. demonstrate that the T7SS of the rhizobacterium Bacillus velezensis SQR9 and its effector protein YukE cause iron leakage in plant roots to support root colonization.