Abstract
Soil microorganisms play important roles in crop production and sustainable agricultural management. However, soil conditions and crop selection are key determining factors for soil microbial communities. This study investigated the effect of plant types and soil salinity on the microbial community of interspecific interaction zone (II) based on the sorghum/peanut intercropping system. Microbial community diversity and composition were determined through PacBio single molecule, real-time sequencing of 16S rDNA and internal transcribed spacer (ITS) genes. Results showed Proteobacteria, Bacteroidota, and Acidobacteriota to be the dominant bacterial phyla in IP, II, and IS, whereas Ascomycota, Basidiomycota, and Mucoromycota were the dominant fungal phyla. Under salt-treated soil conditions, the plants-specific response altered the composition of the microbial community (diversity and abundance). Additionally, the interspecific interactions were also helpful for maintaining the stability and ecological functions of microbial communities by restructuring the otherwise stable core microbiome. The phylogenetic structure of the bacterial community was greatly similar between IP and II while that of the fungal community was greatly similar between IP and IS; however, the phylogenetic distance between IP and IS increased remarkably upon salinity stress. Overall, salinity was a dominant factor shaping the microbial community structure, although plants could also shape the rhizosphere microenvironment by host specificity when subjected to environmental stresses. In particular, peanut still exerted a greater influence on the microbial community of the interaction zone than sorghum.
Highlights
Soil salinization is a compelling environmental challenge that limits the growth and productivity of crops worldwide, since 20% of the world’s arable land and 33% of the irrigated land are affected by soil salinization (Kashyap et al, 2020)
The Venn diagrams depicted the number of operational taxonomic units (OTU) unique to each sample or shared among multiple samples and intuitively displayed an OTU overlap across samples
Bacterial OTU analysis indicated that 731 OTUs were common to all samples; the number of bacterial OTUs shared by NIP and NII was 191 (Figure 2A)
Summary
Soil salinization is a compelling environmental challenge that limits the growth and productivity of crops worldwide, since 20% of the world’s arable land and 33% of the irrigated land are affected by soil salinization (Kashyap et al, 2020). In salinized soils, monoculture farming faces a double combination of excess salinity and continuous cropping obstacles. To overcome these problems, intercropping can be considered a novel approach to increase the efficiency of resource utilization, management of soil-borne diseases, and tolerance of farmland ecosystem stress (Li Q. et al, 2016; Guo et al, 2018; Dang et al, 2020). Zeng et al (2019) indicated that the rhizosphere interactions in a mixture model are helpful in recruiting beneficial microbes, which are closely related to the improvement of plant quality in contaminated soil. The recruitment of specific microbial communities under particular production conditions is an interesting topic
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