Carbon dioxide (CO2)-fixing bacteria are important microbial communities of the soil carbon cycle. It is important to study their community structure characteristics in karst areas to understand the carbon-sequestration mechanism of the soil ecosystem. The top soil samples of paddy fields, maize fields, and citrus orchards were collected in a karst area, mixed zone, and non-karst area at the Maocun karst experimental site in Guilin.The community abundance, composition, and diversity of CO2-fixing bacteria were analyzed using high-throughput sequencing technology with cbbLR as indicating gene. The results show that most of the CO2-fixing bacteria can only be classified as the shallow taxonomic group including bacteria and actinomycetes. The α-Proteobacteria of Proteobacteria was the dominant class in the three areas. Facultative autotrophic bacteria dominated by rhizobia were the main CO2-fixing bacteria. The abundances of Burkholderiales, Rhodopseudomonas, Azospirillum, Sinorhizobium fredii HH103, Rhizobium leguminosarum bv. trifolii were higher in the karst area than in the other two areas. However, Bradyrhizobium is the dominant species in the mixing and non-karst areas. The redundancy analysis shows that the pH, soil organic carbon, soluble organic carbon, cation exchange capacity, and total nitrogen are the main ecological factors affecting the community structure of CO2-fixing bacteria. The above-mentioned results show that the soil properties in the karst area can significantly affect the community structure of CO2-fixing bacteria.
Keywords: Bradyrhizobium; CO2-fixing bacteria; cbbLR gene; high-throughput sequencing; karst area.