Structure and Activity of Bacterial and Archaeal Community Inhabiting Rice Roots and Rhizosphere: Review

Rice is cultivated worldwide on approximately 155 million hectares, accounting for 14% of world arable lands. The great challenge in rice agriculture is to increase rice production using limiting planting area and to minimize methane emissions from soil. In this review, I report the recent progresses in microbiological studies which are dedicated to the understanding of organic matter transformation in paddy fields. The cutting-age technologies have been rapidly developed and applied to environmental microbiology. One of such technologies is carbon stable isotope labeling in combination with molecular ecology tools, which has been proved very powerful in linking microbial community identities to specific biogeochemical processes in situ. This review will be focused on the application of stable isotope probing in the investigations of active microbes responsible for organic C transformation in the soil surrounding rice roots.