High soil pH enhances the network interactions among bacterial and archaeal microbiota in alpine grasslands of the Tibetan Plateau.

Soil functions and processes are driven by complex microbial interactions. It is, therefore, critical to understand the coexistence patterns of soil microbiota, especially in fragile alpine ecosystems. We identified biogeographic patterns in the network-level topological features of the soil microbial co-occurrence network in the Tibetan alpine grasslands, based on high-throughput sequencing. We verified that soil pH was the most important environmental variable for predicting network-level topological features of soil microbial co-occurrence networks. Associations among soil microbiota were enhanced with increasing pH (5.17-8.92), and the network was the most stable at neutral pH. Moreover, node-level topological features suggested that the archaeal operational taxonomic units, compared with bacterial operational taxonomic units, hold a central role in the co-occurrence network. Network-level topological features revealed closer connections among soil microbiota in the steppe ecosystem than in the meadow ecosystem. Therefore, our study demonstrated that soil pH served as a critical environmental filter that influenced the potential associations and ecological signature of soil microbiota in the Tibetan alpine grasslands. These findings provide a new perspective on the distinct biogeographic patterns of co-occurrence networks, to explore the ecological role of soil microbiota and thus help manage soil bacterial and archaeal communities for provisioning alpine ecosystem services.
(© 2020 Society for Applied Microbiology and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.)