With the rise in temperature, the diversity of Archaea decreases while their predictability increases.

Led by Jizhong Zhou, Ph.D., director of the Institute of Environmental Genomics at the University of Oklahoma, an international research team conducted a long-running experiment that found that a warming climate reduced the diversity and significantly changed the community structure of soils. antique. Their findings have been published in the journal The nature of climate change.

At the microbiological level, life can be described as belonging to one of three kingdoms – how species are described in relation to each other. Eukaryotes contain complex organisms such as animals, plants, and microorganisms such as fungi. The other two classes, bacteria and archaea, consist of only microorganisms.

Archaea thrive in a range of environments, from the most hostile to volcanoes and permafrost. However, archaea are also common in the human microbiome and as an important part of the soil ecology.

“Since temperature is the main driver of biological processes, a warming climate will affect different ecological communities,” Zhou said.

“Based on long-term time-series data, our previous studies revealed that experimental warming leads to divergent succession of soil bacterial and fungal communities, accelerates microbial temporal scaling, and reduces biodiversity of soil bacteria, fungi, and protists, but increases bacterial network complexity and stability. However How climate warming affects the chronology of primitive society remains elusive. Archaea are ubiquitous in soils and are vital to soil functions, for example, nitrification and methanogenesis.”

Using a long-term multifactorial experimental field site at OU’s Kessler Atmospheric and Ecological Station, researchers have shown that experimental warming of a tallow coral ecosystem significantly altered the community structure of soil archaea and reduced their taxonomic diversity and evolution.

In contrast to the researchers’ previous observations in bacteria and fungi, their findings show that a warming climate is leading to convergent soil archaeal community succession, suggesting that archaeal community structures will become more predictable in a warmer world.