Abstract Tropical peatlands in South-East Asia are some of the most carbon-dense ecosystems in the world. Extensive repurposing of such peatlands for forestry and agriculture has resulted in substantial microbially-driven carbon emissions. However, we lack an understanding of the microorganisms and their metabolic pathways involved in carbon turnover. Here, we address this gap by reconstructing 764 sub-species-level genomes from peat microbiomes sampled from an oil palm plantation located on a peatland in Indonesia. The 764 genomes cluster into 333 microbial species (245 bacterial and 88 archaeal), of which, 47 are near-complete (completeness ≥90%, redundancy ≤5%, number of unique tRNAs ≥18) and 170 are substantially complete (completeness ≥70%, redundancy ≤10%). The capacity to respire amino acids, fatty acids, and polysaccharides was widespread in both bacterial and archaeal genomes. In contrast, the ability to sequester carbon was detected only in a few bacterial genomes. We expect our collection of reference genomes to help fill some of the existing knowledge gaps about microbial diversity and carbon metabolism in tropical peatlands.
Find this article in full text from Springer Verlag. 
Full Text Finder