Beyond taxonomic identification: integration of ecological responses to a soil bacterial 16S rRNA gene database

High-throughput sequencing 16S rRNA gene surveys have enabled new insights into the diversity of soil bacteria, and furthered understanding of the ecological drivers of abundances across landscapes. However, current analytical approaches are of limited use in formalising syntheses of the ecological attributes of taxa discovered, because derived taxonomic units are typically unique to individual studies and sequence identification databases only characterise taxonomy. To address this, we used sequences obtained from a large nationwide soil survey (GB Countryside Survey, henceforth “CS”) to create a comprehensive soil specific 16S reference database, with coupled ecological information derived from the survey metadata. Specifically, we modelled taxon responses to soil pH at the OTU level using hierarchical logistic regression (HOF) models, to provide information on putative landscape scale pH-abundance responses. We identify that most of the soil OTUs examined exhibit predictable abundance responses across soil pH gradients, though with the exception of known acidophilic lineages, the pH optima of OTU relative abundance was variable and could not be generalised by broad taxonomy. This highlights the need for tools and databases to predict ecological traits at finer taxonomic resolution. We further demonstrate the utility of the database by testing against geographically dispersed query 16S datasets; evaluating efficacy by quantifying matches, and accuracy in predicting pH responses of query sequences from a separate large soil survey. We found that the CS database provided good coverage of dominant taxa; and that the taxa indicating soil pH in a query dataset corresponded with the pH classifications of top matches in the CS database. Furthermore we were able to predict query dataset community structure, using predicted abundances of dominant taxa based on query soil pH data and the HOF models of matched CS database taxa. The database with associated HOF model outputs is released as an online portal for querying single sequences of interest ( https://shiny-apps.ceh.ac.uk/ID-TaxER ), and as a DADA2 database for use in bioinformatics pipelines. The further development of advanced informatics infrastructures incorporating modelled ecological attributes along with new functional genomic information will likely facilitate large scale exploration and prediction of soil microbial functional biodiversity under current and future environmental change scenarios.