TY - JOUR A1 - Noll, Matthias A1 - Frenzel, P. A1 - Conrad, R. T1 - Selective stimulation of type I methanotrophs in a rice paddy soil by urea fertilization revealed by RNA-based stable isotope probing JF - FEMS microbiology ecology N2 - Methane-oxidizing bacteria (MOB) in soil are not only controlled by their main substrates, methane and oxygen, but also by nitrogen availability. We compared an unfertilized control with a urea-fertilized treatment and applied RNA-stable-isotope-probing to follow activity changes upon fertilization as closely as possible. Nitrogen fertilization of an Italian rice field soil increased the CH4 oxidation rates sevenfold. In the fertilized treatment, isopycnic separation of 13C-enriched RNA became possible after 7 days when 300 µmol 13CH4 gdry soil-1 had been consumed. Terminal-restriction fragment length polymorphism (T-RFLP) fingerprints and clone libraries documented that the type I methanotrophic genera Methylomicrobium and Methylocaldum assimilated 13CH4 nearly exclusively. Although previous studies had shown that the same soil contains a much larger diversity of MOB, including both type I and type II, nitrogen fertilization apparently activated only a small subset of the overall diversity of MOB, type I MOB in particular. KW - Methane oxidation KW - Nitrogen fertilization KW - Urea KW - Stable isotope probing PY - 2008 DO - https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1574-6941.2008.00497.x SN - 0168-6496 SN - 1574-6941 VL - 65 IS - 1 SP - 125 EP - 132 PB - Blackwell Publishing CY - Oxford AN - OPUS4-17659 LA - eng AD - Bundesanstalt fuer Materialforschung und -pruefung (BAM), Berlin, Germany ER -