ABSTRACT
Microbial transformations of soil organic N are crucial for plant nutrition. During such transforma tions, microbes buildup and decompose cell-wall constituents. In the short term, soil organic matter (SOM) transformations are thus linked to fluctuations in dead and living microbial biomass (van Veen et al., 1984). Several methods can be used to assess living soil biota (Alef and Nannipieri, 1995; Paul and Clark, 1996), but very few are suitable to determine microbial C and N residues in soil. Among them, analyses of amino sugars provide a clue to the assessment of both dead and living biomass in soil, because plants do not synthesize amino sugars at significant scale (Stevenson, 1982).
