Wood ash fertilization alters the forest humus Archaea community

The combined and separate effects of Cd and wood ash on Archaea from coniferous forest humus were studied in a microcosm experiment. Nonmetric multidimensional scaling of the denaturing gradient gel analysis of polymerase chain reaction amplified 0.9 kb 16S ribosomal DNA fragments revealed changes in archaeal communities due to the ash treatments. Cd with or without ash did not further influence the result. Representatives of the ash and control communities were cloned, grouped by restriction fragment length polymorphism analysis and finally sequenced. All sequences belonged to non-thermophilic Crenarchaea.