Chernevaya taiga is a unique highly productive boreal ecosystem in Siberia (Russia) [1,2]. It was able to retain its “pre-agricultural” level of fertility through the years as it was never exposed to the negative effects of agricultural use. Chernevaya taiga is characterized by very tall grasses, a phenomenon that has yet to be explored. We hypothesize that the unique characteristic of the gigantism of grasses in the confined habitats of Western Siberia is due not only to the particular climatic conditions and soil characteristics of the area, but also to the unique microbial communities found in the soil and plant rhizospheres.
In an era of climate change, identifying, isolating and characterizing bacteria from unique enviroments with PGPR properties can lead to the discovery of new biotechnological tools that would allow using this kind of bacteria to improve the productivity of plants of agronomic interest, thus helping alleviate one the main concerns for global food security. In order to achieve this goal, our study focuses on the analysis of the diversity of the microorganisms from the soil microbiota that promote plant growth, which should lead us to a better undersatind of the causes behind grass gigantism in the boreal forests of Siberia. We also conduct experiments with isolates from this unique biotechnologically potent natural environment in an attempt to improve plant growth and yield to see whether they could be used as bioinoculants. It was found that the physiological parameters of plants grown on the soil from Chernevaya taiga were significantly higher compared to the control soil from other areas of taiga.
The completely unexplored microbiota of Chernevaya taiga may also be a unique source of biologically active molecules such as antibiotics, immunomodulators, immunosuppressants, , vitamins and others. To answer these questions a number of genome-wide hybrid metagenomic assemblies of data obatined with the Illumina and Oxford Nanopor reads for samples collected in Chernevaya taiga of the Novosibirsk region are currently being analyzed. The preliminary results indicate that the data from the soil of Chernevaya taiga contain significantly more biosynthetic gene clusters (BGC) of secondary metabolites with potential biological activity than control samples.