PNNL

Abstract

We present observations from a laboratory-controlled study on the impacts of ex-treme wetting and drying on a wetland soil microbiome. Our approach was to ex-perimentally challenge the soil microbiome to understand impacts on anaerobic carbon cycling processes as the system transitions from dryness to saturation and vice-versa. Specifically, we tested for impacts on stress responses related to shifts from wet to drought conditions. We used a combination of high- resolution data for small organic chemical (metabolites) and biological (community structure based on 16S rRNA sequencing) features. Using a robust correlation-independent data ap-proach, we further tested the predictive power of metabolites for the presence or absence of phyla. Here, we demonstrate that taking an untargeted, multidimen-sional data approach to the interpretation of metabolomics has the potential to in-dicate the causative pathways selecting for the observed bacterial community structure in soils.