Abstract
The relevance of extracellular DNA (eDNA) in the soil ecosystem is becoming more and more evident to the scientific community by the progressive discovery of functions accompanying to natural gene transformation. However, despite the increased number of published articles dedicated to eDNA in soil, so far only few are focused on its single stranded form (eDNAss). The present paper is the first to investigate the quantitative relevance of eDNAss in the total soil eDNA pool, discriminating between its linear (eDNAssl) and circular (eDNAssc) forms and the respective weakly (wa) and tightly (ta) adsorbed fractions. The results showed the prevalence of eDNAss and its linear form in both the total soil eDNA pool and its wa and ta fractions. Both of the eDNAss fractions (linear and circular) were characterized by small fragments.
Highlights
Extracellular DNA can represent up to 40% of the total soil DNA pool [1,2]
In relation to the soil bacterial community, Extracellular DNA (eDNA) can act as a source of nutrients [4, 5, 6], as constituent of biofilms [7, 8, 9] and bio-crusts [10], as agent to influence the porosity of soil aggregates [11, 12], and as signaling- or chemoattractant molecule [13, 14, 7]
The results of two factorial ANOVA analysis of the modified indirect approach have confirmed that the extraction steps and DNA conformation significantly affected the yields of eDNA, both in its single stranded and double stranded form (Fig 2)
Summary
Extracellular DNA (eDNA) can represent up to 40% of the total soil DNA pool [1,2]. Despite the interest of the scientific community on eDNA in soil is quite recent, the studies have highlighted several additional ecological functions to genetic exchange through natural transformation [3]. The soil eDNA can act as source of nutrients [15], as constitutive component of roots extracellular traps defense against biotic [16] and abiotic [17] hazards, as hormone simulant [15, 18] and allelopathic [18] molecules. All these functions and peculiar traits make eDNA to one of the most interesting molecules in soil, capable to affect both the composition and activity of microbial and plant communities. To the best of our knowledge, there are only few studies dealing with eDNAss with focus on its adsorption onto clays [19, 21] and other minerals [22] under laboratory
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