Adjustment of microbial nitrogen use efficiency to carbon:nitrogen imbalances regulates soil nitrogen cycling

Microbial nitrogen use efficiency (NUE) describes the partitioning of organic N taken up between growth and the release of inorganic N to the environment (that is, N mineralization), and is thus central to our understanding of N cycling. Here we report empirical evidence that microbial decomposer communities in soil and plant litter regulate their NUE. We find that microbes retain most immobilized organic N (high NUE), when they are N limited, resulting in low N mineralization. However, when the metabolic control of microbial decomposers switches from N to C limitation, they release an increasing fraction of organic N as ammonium (low NUE). We conclude that the regulation of NUE is an essential strategy of microbial communities to cope with resource imbalances, independent of the regulation of microbial carbon use efficiency, with significant effects on terrestrial N cycling. Nitrogen availability in soils is predominantly controlled by microorganisms, yet our understanding of their organic nitrogen use is limited. Mooshammer et al.show that microbial nitrogen use efficiency is dependent on resource stoichiometry and substrate type.

• Publication year

  2014

• Venue

  Nature Communications

• Publication date

  2014-04-16

• Fields of study

  Biology, Medicine, Chemistry, Environmental Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1038/ncomms4694PMID 24739236PMCID 3997803
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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