The ability to link soil microbial diversity to soil processes requires technologies that
differentiate active microbes from extracellular DNA and dormant cells. Here, we use …

At any given time, only a subset of microbial community members are active in their
environment. The others are in a state of dormancy, with strongly reduced metabolic rates. It …

Our planet's soils teem with microorganisms that regulate processes from crop productivity to
carbon sequestration. Molecular analysis contributes hugely to the characterization of …

Understanding the structure, functions, activities and dynamics of microbial communities in
natural environments is one of the grand challenges of 21st century science. To address this …

The immense diversity of soil bacterial communities has stymied efforts to characterize
individual taxa and document their global distributions. We analyzed soils from 237 …

The microbial ecology of soil still presents a challenge to microbiologists attempting to
establish the ways in which bacteria and fungi actively metabolise substrates, link into food …

The advent of nucleic acid-based molecular methods, in particular the polymerase chain
reaction (PCR), has revolutionised the study of soil microbial ecology, previously …

The emergence of high-throughput DNA sequencing methods provides unprecedented
opportunities to further unravel bacterial biodiversity and its worldwide role from human …

Metagenomic studies have revolutionized our understanding of the metabolic potential of
uncultured microorganisms in various ecosystems. However, many of these genomic …

Microbial community analysis via marker gene amplicon sequencing has become a routine
method in the field of soil research. In this perspective, we discuss technical challenges and …