Microbial activities were not correlated with the exchangeable fraction of heavy metals, indicating that microbial function is not strongly affected by these metals, likely due to the efficiency of the reclamation procedure to reduce metals toxicity.
It is increasingly recognized that microbial function is largely a community dynamic [49].
Another way of analyzing relevant microbial function is to examine the metabolites produced by the microbes, which reveals not just what the bacteria are expressing but what the body is actually absorbing, Salzman says.
However, more knowledge regarding the influence of such treatments on soil microbial functions is still required to establish their actual ability to remediate contaminated soils.
Although collecting molecular data was beyond the scope of this study, examining the links between changes in plant diversity, changes in microbial community structure, and how these changes affect microbial functioning is a key direction for future research [10].
A general amelioration of the soil microbial functions was also produced as shown by basal soil respiration and dehydrogenase and alkaline phosphatase activities, which attained increases of 25%, 138% and 42%, respectively, when soil was amended with 5% sepiolite.
Furthermore, knowledge of how these microbial communities function is required to control them, and metagenomics is a key tool in their understanding.
However, the detailed mechanism of introduction of L. kaempferi on soil microbial diversity and function is worthwhile for further research, such as how the litter affects specifically the composition of microbial community and soil physicochemical properties and the response of composition and structure of microbial community to the litter of exotic species.
In this respect, we believe that only microbial-based fertilisers, where the principal function is due to the microbial species forming the inoculum, should be included in the category of biofertilisers; when the microorganism/s are only an ingredient of a product based mainly on other substances (either inorganic or organic), it should not be included into such category.
In this study, a rule-based microbial network (RMN) algorithm, which integrates regulatory OTU-triplet model with parametric weighting function, is being developed to construct microbial regulatory networks.
A multivariate analysis indicated that the major differences in microbial function could be associated with modification of the soil N cycle following agricultural management.
