Temperature- and time- dependent microbial community dynamics modulates methane cycle in permafrost-affected soils

Abstract

Arctic permafrost soils store large amounts of SOC (soil organic carbon). Thawing permafrost promotes microbial degradation of SOC leading to the biogenic production of greenhouse gases (GHGs) as carbon dioxide and methane. However, the dynamics of microbial community, including bacteria, archaea, protists, and fungi, in methane production and oxidation during thawing remains poorly understood. This study aims to understand the temperature- and time dependent modulation of microbial production and oxidation of methane under anaerobic condition. To demonstrate the potential for methanogenesis and anaerobic oxidation of methane at permafrost, we anaerobically incubated Alaska Council soil cores with 13C-labeled substrates. Furthermore, amplicon sequence data was analyzed by amplicon sequence variants (ASVs). ASVs improves the precision, comprehensiveness and reproducibility of marker-gene data analysis than read clustering based operational taxonomic units (OTUs) analysis.