Open Access

ARTICLE

Experimental evidence of soil bacteria abundance as the primary driver of rhizosphere priming effect

Ma YP^1,2,3#, ZJ Zhang^1,2#, TQ Su^1#, CA Busso⁴, ER Johnston⁵, XG Han^1,6, XM Zhang^2*

1 Institute of Applied Ecology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenyang 110016, China.
2 Key Laboratory of Dryland Agriculture, MOA, Institute of Environment and Sustainable Development in Agriculture, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Beijing100081, China.
3 University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China.
4 Departamento de Agronomía-CERZOS (CONICET), Universidad Nacional del Sur, San Andrés 800, 8000 Bahía Blanca, Provincia de Buenos Aires, Argentina.
5 School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA 30332, USA. 6 State Key Laboratory of Vegetation and Environmental Change, Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100093, China.
# These authors contributed equally to this article.
* Address correspondence to: Ximei Zhang, e-mail: zhangximei@caas.cn This research was supported by the National Key Research and Development Program (2016YFC0500702) and Central Public-interest Scientific Institution Basal Research Fund of China (BSRF201714).