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Applied and Environmental Microbiology, January 2008, p. 526-530, Vol. 74, No. 2
0099-2240/08/$08.00+0 doi:10.1128/AEM.00843-07
Copyright © 2008, American Society for Microbiology. All Rights Reserved.
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Institute of Soil Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Nanjing 210008, People's Republic of China,1 Laboratory of Molecular Microbial Ecology and Ecogenomics, College of Life Science and Biotechnology, Shanghai Jiaotong University, Shanghai, China,2 College of Environmental Science and Engineering, Yangzhou University, Yangzhou 225009, Jiangsu Province, People's Republic of China3
Received 13 April 2007/ Accepted 1 October 2007
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The site of the long-term experiment, established in 1980, is in Suzhou (31°32'45"N; 120°41'57''E), Jiangsu Province, China. The site was initially selected on the basis of its relatively uniform crop growth, the flatness of the soil surface, and the relatively uniform soil fertility, as evidenced by the levels of total nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium measured in 1980. Rice-wheat rotation, a typical cropping system used for more than 1,500 years in the area (4, 5), was adopted (with only six exceptional crops over 25 years) during the experimental period. The total experimental area was 1,600 m2, which was split into 42 plots (14 treatments in triplicate), each with 20 m2 of effective cropping area. The plots were separated by cement plates extending from 50 cm beneath to 15 cm above the soil surface to limit the mixing of water between plots. Separate ditches for irrigation or drainage were designed to ensure uniform control of the water regime. All field agronomic practices were performed manually. The soil is clay loam in texture. Soil fertility variables measured in 2004 (23) indicated that triplicate plots within each treatment were reasonably uniform. A control and four treatments were included in the present study: (i) CK, in which the soil remained unamended (the control); (ii) NPK, in which the soil received N, P, and K fertilizers in combination; (iii) SN, in which the soil received straw plus N; (iv) M, in which the soil received pig manure only; and (v) MNPK, in which the soil received N, P, and K in addition to pig manure. Additional information on the field plots can be found elsewhere (23). Ten soil cores (15 cm in height by 8 cm in diameter) randomly distributed within each 20-m2 plot were sampled, combined, sieved to remove the roots, and brought on ice to the laboratory, where the total DNA was extracted. The soils were sampled twice during the wheat growing season, on 8 April 2006, when wheat was in the early earing stage, and on 1 July 2006, after the wheat harvest (rice transplanting was delayed in this particular year).
For DNA extraction, 2 g of soil was repeatedly homogenized by vortexing it in 20 ml phosphate-buffered saline and centrifuged at 200 x g for 2 min. Microbial cells in the combined supernatant liquid were collected by centrifugation at 12,000 x g for 10 min, washed three times with TENP buffer (50 mM Tris, 20 mM EDTA, 100 mM NaCl, 1% polyvinylpyrrolidone, pH 10; 1-liter volume), and lysed by bead beating. Briefly, the tubes containing the cells, 0.3 g of 0.1-mm zirconium beads, and 150 µl redistilled phenol (pH 8.0) were agitated on a bead beater (Mini-Bead-Beater-8; Biospec Products) at the highest speed for 80 s and then allowed to sit on ice for 1 min. This was repeated twice more for a total of three runs per sample. Next, 110 µl of sodium dodecyl sulfate (10%) was added and gently mixed, and the sample was incubated on ice for 10 min. After this, 150 µl chloroform-isopropanol (25:1, vol/vol) was added, gently mixed, and then centrifuged at 15,000 x g for 10 min. The supernatant liquid was collected, and 1/10 volume of 3 M sodium acetate and 1 volume of phenol were added, followed by centrifugation at 15,000 x g for 10 min. The supernatant was then extracted twice with chloroform-isopropanol (24:1, vol/vol). Nucleic acids in the supernatant were precipitated with cold ethanol. The size of the extracted DNA, as determined by electrophoresis on a 0.5% agarose gel, was found to be
10 to 15 kbp.
The V3 region of the 16S rRNA gene was amplified for denaturing gradient gel electrophoresis (DGGE) analysis using primers P2 and P3 with a 40-bp GC clamp at the 5' end of P3 (16), as previously described (13). The amplified products were separated with a Dcode system (Bio-Rad, Hercules, CA) in an 8% (wt/vol) polyacrylamide gel containing a linear, 35 to 60% denaturant gradient. Electrophoresis was carried out using 1x Tris-acetate-EDTA buffer at 200 V and 60°C for 200 min. The DNA bands were stained with Sybr green (Amresco, Solon, OH) and photographed with a UVI gel documentation system (UVItec, Cambridge, United Kingdom). The images were analyzed with Quantity One software version 4.4 (Bio-Rad, Hercules, CA). A dendrogram of the bands was constructed based on the Dice similarity coefficient using the unweighted-pair group arithmetic average clustering algorithm.
For clone library construction, actinobacterial 16S rRNA genes were amplified with primers S-C-Act-0235-a-S-20 and S-C-Act-0878-a-A-19 by use of previously described PCR conditions (26). The amplified products were purified and concentrated with the UltraClean 15 purification kit (Mo Bio, Inc.), ligated with T4 DNA ligase into a pGEM-T Easy vector (Promega), and electrotransformed into competent Escherichia coli DH5
cells according to the manufacturer's instructions. The transformed cells were plated onto LB agar containing ampicillin (100 µg ml–1; Amresco), isopropyl-β-D-thiogalactopyranoside (IPTG; 1 mM), and 5-bromo-4-chloro-3-indolyl-β-D-galactopyranoside (X-Gal; 80 µg ml–1). Positive colonies were screened by PCR using the amplifying primers. The plasmids containing the correct inserts were sequenced commercially with an ABI 3730 DNA analyzer (Applied Biosystems) using the S-C-Act-0235-a-S-20 primer (Shanghai Sangon Biological Engineering Technology & Services Co., Ltd.). The sequences were double checked for chimeras by use of both the Chimera Detection program from the Ribosomal Database Project II (http://rdp8.cme.msu.edu/cgis/chimera.cgi?su=SSU) and Mallard version 1.02 (2).
Actinobacterial 16S rRNA gene sequences were aligned using the CLUSTAL X interface (28). Operational taxonomic units (OTUs) were identified with DOTUR 1.53 (21) at a DNA distance cutoff of 0.01. The closest representative for each OTU sequence was identified using BLASTn. Phylogenetic neighbor-joining trees were constructed with MEGA version 3.1 (12) using a Jukes-Cantor model. Libraries were compared using the LIBSHUFF program (24) by treating each cloned sequence as a separate sample. Two nonparametric richness estimators (SACE and SChao1), calculated with web-based software (11), were used to estimate whether the libraries were large enough to yield stable phylotype richness estimates. Nonparametric estimators of the fraction and richness of OTUs shared between two communities were analyzed using SONS software (22). The phylogenetic diversity within each community was estimated using DOTUR 1.53, SPADE v2.1 (A. Chao and T.-J. Shen [http://chao.stat.nthu.edu.tw/softwareCE.html]), and Arlequin v3.01 (6).
The DGGE patterns of the 16S rRNA amplified from all of the treatments were generally similar (Fig. 1). The most notable differences were the band intensities rather than the band positions. The dendrogram generated from the bands showed that the April soils could be placed into three clusters, representing CK, manure-treated, and non-manure-treated soils. Similarly to the April soils, the July soils also showed similar DGGE patterns among the treatments (Fig. 1). Note that communities from the April and July samples could not be compared directly by band positions because they were from two separate gels. However, analysis of both the April and July gels generated three clusters that represented the same treatments, indicating that there was no substantial community change over time. CK, NPK, and MNPK soils were, therefore, chosen as the representative soils for further clone library analysis. Clone libraries were constructed from the July samples only.
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FIG. 1. DGGE patterns of soil samples treated with CK, NPK, M, NPK, and SN based on the sequence of the V3 region in the 16S rRNA gene. See the text for descriptions of treatments.
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TABLE 1. Comparison of ecological and molecular estimates of sequence diversity for actinobacterial communities in differently treated soils
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FIG. 2. LIBSHUFF comparison of the homologous and heterogenous coverages between the CK and NPK libraries (A), the CK and MNPK libraries (B), and the NPK and MNPK libraries (C). X represents the CK library in panels A and B and the NPK library in panel C. Y represents the NPK library in panel A and the MNPK library in panels B and C. The fact that the P values produced by both the XY and YX comparisons are smaller than the critical P value of 0.025 indicates that the two libraries being compared are different.
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Nonparametric estimates obtained by SONS analysis (22) are listed in Table 2. The Jabund value, defined as the probability that a randomly selected OTU is found in the libraries under comparison, is a measure of community overlap. In our case, all Jabund values between any two individual communities under comparison were low and were significantly different from 1.0 (Table 2), suggesting that the communities were different from each other. This is further supported by low
YC values (Table 2), measures of community structure similarity, as well as by LIBSHUFF results (Fig. 2). When two libraries were pooled and compared with a third one, the resulting estimates of Jabund values were also low and significantly different from 1.0. When CK was compared with NPK, the Jabund value, for example, was 0.48. When CK was pooled with MNPK (CK+MNPK) and compared with NPK again, the Jabund value was 0.63, higher than 0.48 but still significantly different from 1.0. These results indicate that the pooled community did not result in a significant increase in overlap.
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TABLE 2. Nonparametric estimates of actinobacterial library comparisons using SONS at an OTU of 0.01
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FIG. 3. A Venn diagram comparing the OTU0.01 (OTU assigned at a DNA distance of 0.01) memberships found in the CK (n = 68), NPK (n = 91), and MNPK (n = 89) libraries. Below each library's name are the Chao1 richness estimate and the 95% confidence interval estimated by DOTUR for the respective community. The richness of the overlapping regions was estimated based on the pairwise SA,B Chao richness estimates shared by the three communities and by pooling two communities and estimating the fraction shared with a third community. The Chao1 richness estimate for the three libraries pooled together was 190 (confidence interval, 148 to 274), and the sum of the richness estimates for the individual sectors in the diagram was 182.
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Financial support from the National Science Foundation of China (40471072), the National Key Basic Research and Development Program of China (2005CB121108), and the Knowledge Innovation Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (KZCX2-YW-407) is acknowledged.
Published ahead of print on 12 October 2007. ![]()
Supplemental material for this article may be found at http://aem.asm.org/. ![]()
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