ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Plant Sci.
Sec. Plant Symbiotic Interactions
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpls.2025.1539945
This article is part of the Research TopicSymbiotic Interactions in Microbial-facilitated Vegetation Restoration and Agricultural ManagementView all 13 articles
Changes of soil bacterial community composition and functional groups in different altitude gradients of Potentilla fruticosa shrub in eastern Qinghai-Tibet Plateau
Provisionally accepted
- 1Qinghai University, Xining, China
- 2Qinghai Animal Husbandry and Veterinary College, Xining, Qinghai Province, China
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Soil bacteria play an important role in energy flow and soil nutrient cycle in alpine shrub ecosystem. However, the effects of soil properties and extracellular enzyme activities on soil bacterial communities in alpine P.otentilla fruticosa shrub with different altitude gradients are still unclear. The soil bacterial communities at different altitudes (3400,3700,4000,4300m and 4,300 m) were characterized by Illumina I6S gene sequencing, and the changing rules of soil bacterial communities at different altitudes were revealed.The results showed that:1) at the altitudes of 3700,4000 and 4300 m, Acidobacteriota was the most abundant, while at the altitude of 3700m, Verrucomicrobiota was the most abundant; 2) PCoA analysis showed that the structure of soil bacterial community changed significantly, and the structure was similar at altitudes of 3700, 4000 and 4300 m; 3) Redundancy analysis (RDA) showed that soil properties (TC and BD) and enzyme activities (AG, BG and CBH) were the main factors affecting the bacterial community, while soil properties (TN), microbial biomass (MBC and MBN) and enzyme activities (AG and BG) all had significant effects on the functional groups of soil bacteria, at an altitude of 4300 meters, there is the most complex bacterial network. To sum up, altitude significantly affected soil extracellular enzyme activity and bacterial community structure. These studies provide a new perspective for us to deeply understand the driving factors of soil bacterial community along the elevation gradient. This is helpful to strengthen our awareness of the protection of P.otentilla fruticosa shrub, and also provides basic data for the study of alpine ecosystem in this area.
Keywords: Alpine ecosystem, bacterial community, Different altitudes, Co-occurrence network, soil properties
Received: 05 Dec 2024; Accepted: 12 Aug 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Xie, Ma, wang, Ma and liu. 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:
lele Xie, Qinghai University, Xining, China
yushou Ma, Qinghai University, Xining, China
yanlong wang, Qinghai University, Xining, China
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