Abstract:
Soil microbiomes in forest ecosystems act as both nutrient sources and sinks through a range
of processes including organic matter decomposition, nutrient cycling, and humic compound
incorporation into the soil. Most forest soil microbial diversity studies have been performed in the
northern hemisphere, and very little has been done in forests within African continent. This study
examined the composition, diversity and distribution of prokaryotes in Kenyan forests top soils
using amplicon sequencing of V4-V5 hypervariable region of the 16S rRNA gene. Additionally, soil
physicochemical characteristics were measured to identify abiotic drivers of prokaryotic distribution.
Different forest soils were found to have statistically distinct microbiome compositions, with
Proteobacteria and Crenarchaeota taxa being the most differentially abundant across regions within
bacterial and archaeal phyla, respectively. Key bacterial community drivers included pH, Ca, K, Fe, and
total N while archaeal diversity was shaped by Na, pH, Ca, total P and total N. To contextualize the
prokaryote diversity of Kenyan forest soils on a global scale, the sample set was compared to amplicon
data obtained from forest biomes across the globe; displaying them to harbor distinct microbiomes
with an over-representation of uncultured taxa such as TK-10 and Ellin6067 genera.
Description:
DATA AVAILABILITY : The demultiplexed high-quality sequence reads has been deposited in the National Centre for Biotechnology
Information (NCBI) Sequence Read Archive (SRA), as Bio Project ID: PRJNA851255 and study accession numbers
available for download at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/biopr oject/851255. This Whole Genome Shotgun
project has been deposited at DDBJ/EMBL/GenBank under the Bioproject PRJNA291812. The metadata, soil
chemistry data, input files for Qiime and R analysis scripts were deposited at https://zenodo.org/ and a DOI-10.5281/zenodo.7827433 available using the link; https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.78274 32.