ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Microbiol.
Sec. Microbe and Virus Interactions with Plants
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fmicb.2025.1633379
This article is part of the Research TopicForest Soil Microbiome and Their Interactions with the PlantsView all 5 articles
Soil Viruses Drive Carbon Turnover During Subtropical Secondary Forest Succession
Provisionally accepted
- 1Fujian Normal University, Fuzhou, China
- 2The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia
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Soil viruses are increasingly recognized as key regulators of microbial ecology and ecosystem function, yet their roles in forest ecosystems, particularly during natural secondary succession, remain largely unexplored. Here, we examined soil viral communities across five successional stages of secondary forests to investigate their taxonomic dynamics and functional potential. Using high-throughput viral metagenomics, we characterized viral community structure, abundance, and auxiliary metabolic gene content. Our results demonstrate that soil viral abundance and community composition shift significantly with forest stand age. Viral richness increased during succession, with compositional transitions observed across stages; however, tailed bacteriophages consistently dominated. Structural equation modeling and linear mixed-effects analysis identified soil pH and bacterial diversity as primary environmental determinants of viral diversity. Functionally, soil viruses harbored auxiliary metabolic genes related to carbohydrate metabolism, indicating their potential involvement in modulating host metabolic processes. Successional trends in viral functional profiles revealed a transition from carbon assimilation to carbon release pathways, suggesting viral mediation of carbon turnover. Notably, the enrichment of glycoside hydrolase and glycosyltransferase genes across forest ages implies a role for viruses in shaping microbial carbon processing capacities through carbohydrate-active enzyme contributions. Collectively, these findings provide novel evidence that soil viruses actively participate in ecosystem succession by influencing microbial functional potential and biogeochemical cycling. This study underscores the ecological importance of soil viral communities in regulating carbon dynamics during 3 secondary forest development.
Keywords: Metavirome, Auxiliary carbohydrate-active enzyme genes, carbon cycling, succession, Secondary forest
Received: 22 May 2025; Accepted: 18 Aug 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Chen, Yu, Yan, Yuan and He. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Danting Yu, Fujian Normal University, Fuzhou, China
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