[Bacterial genetic diversity in soils and their correlation with vegetation]

Soil is an important epicenter of biodiversity. Human activity has threatened such biodiversity through vegetation shift. As the major type of microbes, bacteria have played key roles in material cycling. Since simple morphological characters and the failure of the major portion of bacteria in surviving artificial cultivation have hindered bacterial diversity from analyses using traditional taxonomic approaches, bacterial diversity and its correlation with vegetation is less understood. In order to detour cultivation, tag serial sequencing strategy was developed in this study, in which a 26 base pair highly variable region has been chosen from 16S ribosomal RNA gene as variant-representing tags, ligated into serials and sequenced. Molecular bacterial diversity in soils has been determined using tag types, tag frequencies and diversity index as parameters. The correlation of bacterial diversity with vegetation has been explored as well. Bacterial diversity and differentiation correlate highly with contents of organic matter and nitrogen of soils and further vegetation.