ARS | Publication request: Members of soil bacterial communities sensitive to tillage and crop rotation.

Submitted to: Phytopathology
Publication Type: Abstract Only
Publication Acceptance Date: May 15, 2009
Publication Date: June 2, 2009
Citation: Yin, C., Jones, S., Peterson, D., Garrett, K., Hulbert, S., Schroeder, K.L., Paulitz, T.C. 2009. Members of soil bacterial communities sensitive to tillage and crop rotation. Phytopathology 99: S147

Technical Abstract: Microorganisms play a major role in soil fertility and agricultural practices are known to exert influences on the community diversity of soil microorganisms. By using high-throughput sequencing approaches, we examined microbial populations in four cultivation and crop rotation treatments from a long-term field experiment in Kansas. From the two years of sampling, a total of 20,180 DNA 16s rDNA sequences were generated and a total of 2337 operational taxonomic units (OTUs) were assembled using a 97% similarity cutoff. The most abundant taxonomic group was the phylum Acidobacteria. Many of the Acidobacteria Group 1 OTUs showed a significant preference for continuous wheat over a wheat-soybean rotation and half the Acidobacteria Group 2 OTUs showed a preference for no-till over conventional tillage. Seventy percent of the contigs of Acidobacteria group 3 showed no treatment preference, but 22% showed a preference for the continuous wheat rotation. Unlike the other Acidobacteria groups, 75% of Group 4 contigs showed a preference for the wheat-soybean rotation. OTUs in the genus Gemmatimonas showed a range of treatment preference similar to Acidobacteria group 1. Estimated differences in the abundance of different taxa were validated by quantitative real-time PCR. Differences in specific taxa are easy to detect by high-throughput sequencing approaches, which identified bacterial taxa that were sensitive to tillage and rotation effects.