Community Structure of Ammonia Oxidizing Bacteria and Their Potential to Produce Nitrous Oxide and Carbon Dioxide in Acid Tea Soils

Abstract

The potentials of nitrous oxide (N ₂ O) and carbon dioxide (CO ₂ ) production in acid tea soils from Indonesia and Japan were investigated in a laboratory incubation experiment, and the community structures of ammonia-oxidizing bacteria in these soils were characterized using PCR-DGGE approaches. The soils used were sampled from tea plantations in Shizuoka, Japan and in Bogor and Malino, Indonesia. All of the soils were acidic (pH 3.45 to 4.00). The N ₂ O and CO ₂ production in Shizuoka was almost 5 times higher than in Bogor and Malino. All of the amoA gene sequences defined belong to the genus Nitrosospira sp. with cluster 2 and cluster 3a.

Keywords:

• acid tea soils
• Ammonia Oxidizing Bacteria (AOB)
• CO₂
• N₂O

Acknowledgments

This study was supported by the GHG-SSCP project (S2-3a) of the Global Environment Research Fund by the Ministry of the Environment, Japan. We thank the staff of Bogor and Malino tea plantations in Indonesia for their support during the survey and soil sampling. We thank Dr. Agnes T. Padre, International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), Los Banos, Philippines for valuable comments.