土壤甲烷氧化菌多样性研究方法进展

土壤中最大的甲烷生物汇是甲烷氧化菌的氧化作用，约占全球甲烷汇的10％．甲烷氧化菌在土壤中以多样性的群落形式存在，鉴定其群落多样性对揭示土壤中甲烷氧化的微生物学机制及全球甲烷循环有重要的意义．本研究综述了土壤甲烷氧化菌的定义、分类和氧化甲烷的过程，对比了目前土壤甲烷氧化菌群落结构多样性研究中的主要方法及其应用，包括传统微生物培养方法、不依赖于培养的分子生物学方法和稳定同位素示踪方法等，提出了稳定同位素示踪方法能很好地检测到土壤中活跃的甲烷氧化菌群落多样性变化．

Advances in Research Methods of Soil Methanotrophs Diversity

The largest biological sink of methane is the oxidation of methanotrophs in soils, which contributes about 10% to the total of global CH4 sink. Soil methanotrophs are quite diverse in species compositions. A better understanding of the methanotrophic community structure is important to reveal the microbial mechanism of methane oxidation in soils. This paper reviews the definition and taxonomy of methanotrophs, illustrates the metabolism of substrates by methanotrophs and compares different methods of studying methanotrophic diversity in soils, such as traditional culture-dependent methods, culture-independent molecular biology methods and stable isotope probing methods. It is pointed out that stable isotope probing is an effective method to analyze the active methanotrophic bacteria popula-tions in soils.