Abstract
Despite soil is a thin layer covering terrestrial Earth surface, it carries out functions that are essential for the terrestrial life forms and these functions are mainly conducted by soil icroorganisms, such as fungi and bacteria. They live in a complex, structured and peculiar nvironment. Microbial diversity is huge and soil is considered the most biodiverse ecosystem on arth because a handful of soil can contain thousands of millions microbial cells. Despite the high microbial biomass only less than 1% of the available space is occupied by soil microorganisms because most of the available microenvironments show conditions hostile to microbial life. The application of molecular techniques has markedly improved the knowledge of the microbial life and activity in soil. In particular, the microbial species inhabiting soil can be detected whereas the expression of genes is still a technical challenge. Gross rates of nutrient transformations can be determined by using labelled compounds with positive implications on the evaluation of soil nutrient dynamics, including availability for plants.
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