Long-Term N Fertilization Decreased Diversity and Altered the Composition of Soil Bacterial and Archaeal Communities

Long-Term N Fertilization Decreased Diversity and Altered the Composition of Soil Bacterial and Archaeal Communities

Soil microbial communities are essential in the cycling of nutrients that affect crop production. Our goal was to characterize the microbial community structure following 34 years of nitrogen (N) fertilization treatments in continuous maize production in highly fertile soils. Using 16S rRNA gene-bas...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Agronomy (Basel) Vol. 9; no. 10; p. 574
Main Authors: Sun, Renpeng, Zhang, Pan, Riggins, Chance W., Zabaloy, María C., Rodríguez-Zas, Sandra, Villamil, María B.
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: Basel MDPI AG 23-09-2019
Subjects:
Bioinformatics
Community structure
corn monoculture
Crop production
Cyanobacteria
Fertilization
Fertilizers
Genetic testing
Laboratories
Microbial activity
Microorganisms
Mollisols
Nitrates
Nitrogen
Nutrient cycles
Nutrients
Phylogenetics
Prokaryotes
prokaryotic diversity
Relative abundance
rRNA 16S
Soil fertility
Soil microorganisms
Soils
United States > US
Illinois
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Summary:Soil microbial communities are essential in the cycling of nutrients that affect crop production. Our goal was to characterize the microbial community structure following 34 years of nitrogen (N) fertilization treatments in continuous maize production in highly fertile soils. Using 16S rRNA gene-based analysis of the V4 region via Illumina HiSeq2500 technology with downstream bioinformatics processing and analysis with QIIME 2.0, we aimed to characterize the prokaryotic communities under three increasing N fertilization rates. Factor analyses indicated that a high N level decreased the diversity of soil bacterial and archaeal communities and altered the relative abundance (RA) of the dominant (>1% RA) and minor (<1% RA) phyla. Among the 12 major phyla, we determined increases in Gemmatimonadetes, Proteobacteria, and Euryarchaeota, accompanied by reductions in Cyanobacteria, Chloroflexi, Firmicutes, and Planctomycetes with increasing N. Within the 29 minor phyla, N fertilization led to increases in Aquificae, WPS2, Parvarchaeota, AD3, FCPU426, Armatimonadetes, TM7, Chlamydiae, and OD1, along with reductions of Nitrospirae, WS3, Tenericutes, Lentisphaerae, OP3, Synergistetes, Thermotogae, and prokaryotes that could not be reliably assigned to a phylum (classified as Other).
ISSN:2073-4395
2073-4395
DOI:10.3390/agronomy9100574