Long-term nitrogen application decreases the abundance and copy number of predatory myxobacteria and alters the myxobacterial community structure in the soil

[Display omitted] •Myxobacterial abundance and copy number were reduced after 29-year N application.•The top 100 Myxobacterial OTU copy numbers exceeded 105 per g of soil.•Soil pH, OM, and available P explained most Myxobacterial community variation. Myxobacteria are fascinating micro-predators due to their extraordinary social lifestyle, which is unique in the bacterial domain. These taxa are metabolically active in the soil microbial food web and control populations of soil microbes. However, the effects of fertilisation treatments on predatory myxobacteria in agricultural systems are often overlooked. Here, the high-throughput absolute abundance quantification (HAAQ) method was employed to investigate the abundance and cell density of myxobacteria in the Red Soil Experimental Station fields following 29 years of fertilisation. Using 16S rRNA gene amplicons, we detected a total of 419 myxobacterial operational taxonomic units (OTUs), accounting for 0.25–2.70% of the total bacterial abundance. Significantly different myxobacterial communities were found between nitrogen-fertilised (N_cluster) and manure-fertilised (M_cluster) samples by principal coordinate analysis (PCoA), analysis of similarities (ANOSIM), and Manhattan analysis (p