Exploration of Soil Functional Microbiomes—A Concept Proposal for Long-Term Fertilized Grasslands
Vlad Stoian,
Roxana Vidican,
Păcurar Florin,
Larisa Corcoz,
Victoria Pop-Moldovan,
Ioana Vaida,
Sorin-Daniel Vâtcă,
Valentina Ancuța Stoian,
Anca Pleșa
Affiliations
Vlad Stoian
Department of Microbiology, Faculty of Agriculture, University of Agricultural Sciences and Veterinary Medicine Cluj-Napoca, Calea Mănăştur 3-5, 400372 Cluj-Napoca, Romania
Roxana Vidican
Department of Microbiology, Faculty of Agriculture, University of Agricultural Sciences and Veterinary Medicine Cluj-Napoca, Calea Mănăştur 3-5, 400372 Cluj-Napoca, Romania
Păcurar Florin
Department of Grasslands and Forage Crops, Faculty of Agriculture, University of Agricultural Sciences and Veterinary Medicine Cluj-Napoca, Calea Mănăştur 3-5, 400372 Cluj-Napoca, Romania
Larisa Corcoz
Department of Microbiology, Faculty of Agriculture, University of Agricultural Sciences and Veterinary Medicine Cluj-Napoca, Calea Mănăştur 3-5, 400372 Cluj-Napoca, Romania
Victoria Pop-Moldovan
Department of Microbiology, Faculty of Agriculture, University of Agricultural Sciences and Veterinary Medicine Cluj-Napoca, Calea Mănăştur 3-5, 400372 Cluj-Napoca, Romania
Ioana Vaida
Department of Grasslands and Forage Crops, Faculty of Agriculture, University of Agricultural Sciences and Veterinary Medicine Cluj-Napoca, Calea Mănăştur 3-5, 400372 Cluj-Napoca, Romania
Sorin-Daniel Vâtcă
Department of Plant Physiology, Faculty of Agriculture, University of Agricultural Sciences and Veterinary Medicine Cluj-Napoca, Calea Mănăştur 3-5, 400372 Cluj-Napoca, Romania
Valentina Ancuța Stoian
Department of Plant Physiology, Faculty of Agriculture, University of Agricultural Sciences and Veterinary Medicine Cluj-Napoca, Calea Mănăştur 3-5, 400372 Cluj-Napoca, Romania
Anca Pleșa
Department of Grasslands and Forage Crops, Faculty of Agriculture, University of Agricultural Sciences and Veterinary Medicine Cluj-Napoca, Calea Mănăştur 3-5, 400372 Cluj-Napoca, Romania
Exploring grassland microbiomes is a challenge in the current context of linking soil microorganism activity with the balance of these ecosystems. Microbiologists are constantly attempting to develop faster and lower-cost methods, and propose new and best-fitted indicators that will provide a more complex data analysis. A different concept was proposed for assessing functional microbiomes by splitting the functional ecological niche into complementary segments. The comparison with the upper and lower limits of the ecological niche provides a clearer image of community alterations due to long-term applied treatments. The method allows the extraction of the most sensitive and stable functional guilds, with the extraction of the most critical dominant–codominant functional groups in every segment of the functional niche. The resulting microbial functional–sociological model is ready to use on community-level physiological profile databases and also can be applied backward for vegetation analysis.
