New preprint on carbon cycling in alpine soils

A new preprint from our group, “Metagenomic Insights Into Microbial Controls of Carbon Cycling in Alpine Soils”, explores how soil microbes regulate carbon transformations under shifting redox conditions in alpine riparean areas.
Using shotgun metagenomics, the study shows that microbial community composition and functional genes differ strongly between oxygen-rich and oxygen-poor soils. The microbial analyses were complemented by pyrolysis GC-MS analyses to characterize the chemistry of organic matter in the system. The findings underline the sensitivity of alpine soils—key ecosystems for carbon storage—to climate-driven changes in moisture and soil redox dynamics.

This study is part of the PhD projects of Kristina and Bence. We greatly enjoyed working with Xingguo Han on the metagenomic analyses and Bart van Dongen and Ilya Strashnov on the pyrolysis GC/MS analysis.