Clustering Analysis of Global Soil Microbe Metagenome for Characterizing Community
Tetsushi Tanaka (1751069)
There is a huge number of bacteria in the soil and their existence and function affect the soil properties. Bacteria form a complex community called microbiome. Compared to the ecosystem of plants and animals, we still know little about soil microbial ecosystem. How the soil microbiomes are different throughout the world and how they relate to the region and the environment is a major interest. Recently, the development of next-generation sequencer has been enabled to accumulate microbiome data, and a large scale and comprehensive microbiome analysis are required by an information scientific approach.
In this study, we compared and analyzed the data from various environments on a global scale using the microbiome database, the Earth Microbiome Project (EMP). We calculated the distance based on genetic distance, named UniFrac distance and did clustering analysis. Clustering results were ecologically interpreted from the view of function and characteristics of bacteria. We tentatively classified 4998 samples into 11 clusters, and 7 clusters could be interpreted ecologically. We revealed a group of bacteria characteristic of paddy, vineyard, grasslands in Mongolian, forests, and biofilter.
This research is expected to lead to knowledge of soil management based on soil microbiome.