Functional diversity of soil microbes across environmental gradients
Numerous globally distributed 16S rRNA surveys of soil bacterial communities are     now revealing consistent trends in the main environmental drivers of     biodiversity. Soil pH is consistently revealed as the predominant correlate of     taxonomic diversity, with low pH soils comprising less diversity and being     dominated by a few broad taxonomic groups such as the oligotrophic acidobacteria     phylum. What is less clear is what these broad differences in patterns of     taxonomic diversity mean for the functional genetic potential of soils. The low     culturability of many taxa from low pH soils means that they are significantly     underrepresented in genome sequence databases. Therefore, this study aims to     provide a metagenomic comparison of geographically isolated soils of low pH with     neutral pH soils to identify any broad functional differences between soils of     similar taxonomic composition.