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Molecular Methods for Studying Microbial Ecology in the Soil and Rhizosphere

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Molecular Mechanisms of Plant and Microbe Coexistence

Part of the book series: Soil Biology ((SOILBIOL,volume 15))

As described throughout this book, soil and rhizosphere microorganisms are responsible for a wide range of ecosystem services, including decomposing organic matter, cycling and immobilizing nutrients, aggregating soil, filtering and bioremediating pollutants, suppressing and causing plant disease, and producing and releasing greenhouse gasses. A long-standing challenge for studies in soil and rhizosphere ecology has been developing effective methods that can be used to describe the diversity, function and abundance of soil and plant-associated microbial populations. Enormous advances have been made since the first report by Torsvik (1980) that deoxyribonucleic acids (DNA) could be extracted from soil and subsequently characterized and that there may be as many as 6000–10,000 different genomes in 1g of soil (Torsvik et al. 1990). A recent analysis based on reassociation kinetics done by Gans et al. (2005) suggests that this number is conservative and that the number of individual genomes per 1 g of soil may approach 277,000. This number far exceeds diversity estimates from any other matrix, making soil the most complex and diverse environment on earth.

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  1. Department of Crop and Soil Sciences, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY

    Janice E. Thies

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  1. National Botanical Research Institute, Rana Pratap Marg, Lucknow, 226001, India

    Chandra Shekhar Nautiyal

  2. Département de phytologie Pavillon Charles-Eugène Marchand, Université Laval, 1030, avenue de la Médecine, Québec (Québec), G1V 0A6, Canada

    Patrice Dion

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Thies, J.E. (2008). Molecular Methods for Studying Microbial Ecology in the Soil and Rhizosphere. In: Nautiyal, C.S., Dion, P. (eds) Molecular Mechanisms of Plant and Microbe Coexistence. Soil Biology, vol 15. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-75575-3_17

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