Responsible Editor: Ma Jiayu

On the October 27th, Xiao Zhang, a young teacher in our college, published a research paper entitled "Local community assembly mechanisms shape soil β diversity patterns along a latitudinal gradient" in the Nature communications. From the large-scale investigation of the soil microbial distribution pattern of different forest ecosystems in the north-south forest sample belt in eastern China, it reveals the mechanism of soil microbial local community formation, and plays a leading role in the formation of soil bacterial diversity distribution pattern in the eastern latitude gradient of China.