Microbial oxidizers of trace gases such as hydrogen (H2) and carbon monoxide (CO) are widely distributed in soil microbial communities and play a vital role in modulating biogeochemical cycles. However, the contribution of trace gas oxidizers to soil carbon fixation and the driving environmental factors remain unclear, especially on large scales. Here, Prof. TENG Ying and his team utilized biogeochemical and genome-resolved metagenomic profiling, assisted by machine learning analysis, to estimate the contributions of trace gas oxidizers to soil carbon fixation and to predict the key environmental factors driving this process in soils from five distinct ecosystems. The results showed that phylogenetically and physiologically diverse H2 and CO oxidizers and chemosynthetic carbon-fixing microbes are present in the soil in different terrestrial ecosystems. The large-scale variations in soil carbon fixation were highly positively correlated with both the abundance and the activity of H2 and CO oxidizers (p < 0.05–0.001). Furthermore, soil pH and moisture-induced shifts in the abundance of H2 and CO oxidizers partially explained the variation in soil carbon fixation (55%). The contributions of trace gas oxidizers to soil carbon fixation in the different terrestrial ecosystems were estimated to range from 1.1% to 35.0%. The estimated rate of trace gas carbon fixation varied from 0.04 to 1.56 mg kg^–1 d^–1. These findings reveal that atmospheric trace gas oxidizers may contribute to soil carbon fixation driven by key soil environmental factors, highlighting the non-negligible contribution of these microbes to terrestrial carbon cycling.

This study was published in Environmental Science& Technology in October.

Graphical abstract