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Studies addressing microbial biogeography have increased during the past decade, but research on microbial distribution patterns is still in its infancies and many aspects are only poorly understood. Here, we compared the methanotroph community in paddy soils sampled in Indonesia, Vietnam, China and Italy, focusing on the distance-decay relationship. We used the pmoA gene as marker for methanotroph diversity in T-RFLP, microarray and pyrosequencing approaches. Furthermore, we performed an in-depth analysis of type II methanotroph pmoA distribution at the sequence level. We used ordination analysis to project sequence dissimilarities into a 3-dimensional space (multidimensional scaling). The ordination suggests that type II methanotrophs in paddy fields can be divided into five major groups. However, these groups were found to be distributed in all soils independent of the geographic origin. |