ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2016
Global biogeography of microbial nitrogen-cycling traits in soil.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 162 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
162 citing papers in PubMed.
- From dividing to dormant: embracing the full activity spectrum for environmental microorganisms.Microbiology and molecular biology reviews : MMBR · 2026Review
- Microbial Functional Genes Help Explain Soil Carbon Sensitivity to Temperature Across Global Biomes.Global change biology · 2026Article
- Interaction Mechanisms Among Soil Environmental Factors, Microbial Communities, and Nitrogen-Cycling Functional Genes in Cool-Climate Maize Fields.Microorganisms · 2026Article
- Different grazing intensities affect soil nitrogen cycling by altering microbial nitrogen metabolism in alpine wetlands.iScience · 2026Article
- The microecological mechanism of Cordyceps chanhua promoting soil nitrogen cycling.Environmental microbiome · 2026Article
- Historical Contingency Drives Freshwater Microbial Community Assembly Across Successional Time.Ecology and evolution · 2026Article
- Warming-induced unstable microbial community metabolically lowers straw-carbon sequestration in paddy soils.Journal of advanced research · 2026Article
- Phylosymbiosis and functional redundancy in the Drosophila (Diptera: Drosophilidae) gut microbiome and its implications for host fitness.Journal of insect science (Online) · 2026Article
- Linking microbial taxonomy and function in N and P metabolism: a study of organic amendments in semiarid restored soils.Environmental microbiome · 2026Article
- Enhancement of soil microbial community stability by earthworms and collembolans in soil from abandoned coal mine lands.Frontiers in microbiology · 2026Article
- Shading affects the nitrogen cycling process and plant nitrogen uptake by altering the rhizosphere microbial community.Frontiers in plant science · 2026Article
- Fermentative nitrite ammonifiers are abundant in soils and ecologically distinct from NrfA-dependent ammonifiers.ISME communications · 2026Article
- Faster turnover of taxonomic over functional bacterial composition during vermicomposting indicates increasing functional redundancy.PloS one · 2026Article
- Soil Nitrogen Mineralization Is Driven by Functional Microbiomes Across a North-South Forest in China.Microorganisms · 2025Article
- Effects of water flow conditions on soil properties and microbial communities in the lower Heihe river Basin, Northwest China.BMC microbiology · 2025Article
- Metagenomic Insights into Disease-Induced Microbial Dysbiosis and Elemental Cycling Alterations inJournal of fungi (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Anthropogenic climate change may reduce global diazotroph diversity.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Environment selected microbial function rather than taxonomic species in a plateau saline-alkaline wetland.Applied and environmental microbiology · 2025Article
- Distribution characteristics of endophytic bacteria and endophytic nitrogen-fixing bacteria in Vicia faba root nodules in Rocky desertification areas of Southwest China.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Functional and Genomic Evidence of L-Arginine-Dependent Bacterial Nitric Oxide Synthase Activity inBiology · 2025Article
102 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Microorganisms drive much of the Earth's nitrogen (N) cycle, but we still lack a global overview of the abundance and composition of the microorganisms carrying out soil N processes. To address this gap, we characterized the biogeography of microbial N traits, defined as eight N-cycling pathways, using publically available soil metagenomes. The relative frequency of N pathways varied consistently across soils, such that the frequencies of the individual N pathways were positively correlated across the soil samples. Habitat type, soil carbon, and soil N largely explained the total N pathway frequency in a sample. In contrast, we could not identify major drivers of the taxonomic composition of the N functional groups. Further, the dominant genera encoding a pathway were generally similar among habitat types. The soil samples also revealed an unexpectedly high frequency of bacteria carrying the pathways required for dissimilatory nitrate reduction to ammonium, a little-studied N process in soil. Finally, phylogenetic analysis showed that some microbial groups seem to be N-cycling specialists or generalists. For instance, taxa within the Deltaproteobacteria encoded all eight N pathways, whereas those within the Cyanobacteria primarily encoded three pathways. Overall, this trait-based approach provides a baseline for investigating the relationship between microbial diversity and N cycling across global soils.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.