Exogenous rare earth element-yttrium deteriorated soil microbial community structure

In this study, we selected yttrium as the representative of REEs to investigate the impacts of exogenous yttrium on soil physicochemical properties and microbiota. The results showed that exogenous yttrium has no significant effect on soil physical properties but a significantly negative impact on soil chemical properties. The results of high-throughput sequencing demonstrate that exogenous yttrium significantly decreases the number of OTUs, ACE, Chao 1, and Shannon indices while increases the Simpson index（P 〈 0.05）, indicating the low soil microbial diversity. The relative abundances of soil microbes are significantly changed at phylum and genus level. Principal component analysis（PCA） showed the significant difference of microbial community between yttrium treatments（YCl_3-250 and YCl_3-500） and non-yttrium treatment（CK） and the similarity of that between YCl_3-250 and YCI_3-500. Proteobacteria and Bacteroidetes are found to be the most tolerant phyla to exogenous yttrium while Verrucomicrobia the most sensitive phylum. Redundancy analysis（RDA） results suggest that exogenous yttrium affects soil microbiota only through changing the soil chemical properties but not soil physical properties, and C/N ratio is the key environmental factor.