3.5 Functional responses of bacterial community to grassland
degradation
PICRUSt analysis was conducted to investigate variation in bacterial
community functional structure in the course of grassland degradation.
Bacterial functional gene diversity in highly degraded grassland was
higher than that in slightly degraded grasslands (Table S4,P < 0.05) . In addition, the KO gene numbers of each
OTU increased significantly with the progression of degradation, and
were negatively correlated with soil nutrient (OM, TN, and TP) contents(Table S5, P < 0.05) . The results indicated
that bacterial communities in degraded grassland conditions and
relatively poor nutrient conditions would harbor relatively high amounts
of genetic information. In addition, genetic information harbored by
species increased with an increase in ses.MNTD (Figure 5,P < 0.05) , indicating that phylogenetic dispersion in
community assembly under grassland degradation would lead to more
functional genes, which could facilitate better adaptation by
communities to resource scarcity.