Vertical distribution patterns and drivers of soil bacterial communities across the continuous permafrost region of northeastern China

Background Soil microorganisms in the thawing permafrost play key roles in the maintenance of ecosystem function and regulation of biogeochemical cycles. However, our knowledge of patterns and drivers of permafrost microbial communities is limited in northeastern China. Therefore, we investigated the community structure of soil bacteria in the active, transition and permafrost layers based on 90 soil samples collected from 10 sites across the continuous permafrost region using high-throughput Illumina sequencing. Results Proteobacteria (31.59%), Acidobacteria (18.63%), Bacteroidetes (9.74%), Chloroflexi (7.01%) and Actinobacteria (6.92%) were the predominant phyla of the bacterial community in all soil layers; however, the relative abundances of the dominant bacterial taxa varied with soil depth. The bacterial community alpha-diversity based on the Shannon index and the phylogenetic diversity index both decreased significantly with depth across the transition from active layer to permafrost layer. Nonmetric multidimensional scaling analysis and permutation multivariate analysis of variance revealed that microbial community structures were significantly different among layers. Redundancy analysis and Spearman's correlation analysis showed that soil properties differed between layers such as soil nutrient content, temperature and moisture mainly drove the differentiation of bacterial communities. Conclusions Our results revealed significant differences in bacterial composition and diversity among soil layers. Our findings suggest that the heterogeneous environmental conditions between the three soil horizons had strong influences on microbial niche differentiation and further explained the variability of soil bacterial community structures. This effort to profile the vertical distribution of bacterial communities may enable better evaluations of changes in microbial dynamics in response to permafrost thaw, which would be beneficial to ecological conservation of permafrost ecosystems.