Abstract
Soil fauna play an essential role in the soil ecosystem, but they may be influenced by insecticidal Cry proteins derived from Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) maize. In this study, a 2-year field trial was conducted to study the effects of transgenic cry1Ie maize, a type of Bt maize (Event IE09S034), on soil fauna, with the near-isogenic line non-Bt maize (Zong 31) as a control. The soil animals were collected with Macfadyen heat extractor and hand-sorting methods, respectively, and their diversity, abundance and community composition were calculated. Then, the effects of maize type, year, sampling time and soil environmental factors on the soil fauna were evaluated by repeated-measures ANOVA, redundancy analysis (RDA) and nonmetric multidimensional scaling (nMDS). Repeated-measures ANOVA showed that the diversity and abundance of the soil fauna were not affected by maize type, while they were significantly influenced by year and sampling time. Furthermore, for both the Macfadyen and hand-sorting methods, RDA indicated that soil fauna community composition was not correlated with maize type (Bt and non-Bt maize) but was significantly correlated with year, sampling time and root biomass. In addition, it was significantly related to soil pH according to the hand-sorting method. nMDS indicated that soil fauna community composition was significantly correlated with year and sampling time; however, it was not associated with maize type. In this study, we collected soil faunal samples according to the Macfadyen and hand-sorting methods and processed the obtained data with ANOVA, RDA, and nMDS in three ways, and our data indicate that transgenic cry1Ie maize (Event IE09S034) had no substantial influence on the diversity, abundance or community composition of the soil fauna.
Highlights
Since the first commercial genetically modified (GM) crop was cultivated in the United States in 19961, GM crops have been planted for 22 years[2,3,4]
This study provides useful data for the commercialization of GM crops in the future
When the soil fauna community was extracted according to the Macfadyen method, in 2014 and 2015, a total of 20,133 and 21,777 soil animals were found in the Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) and non-Bt maize plots, respectively, and the animals in the two types of maize field both belonged to 11 species
Summary
Since the first commercial genetically modified (GM) crop was cultivated in the United States in 19961, GM crops have been planted for 22 years[2,3,4]. The main method for researching the impacts of GM crops on environmental safety is to monitor biodiversity[6,7] in the field With this method, many studies have been conducted on the diversity of aboveground species communities[8,9,10,11,12], but there has been less focus on belowground species communities. Transgenic cry1Ab gene crops, a type of commercialized GM crop, have been studied and showed no impacts on soil organisms[19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27,28,29]. The transgenic cry1Ie maize hybrid (Bt maize, Event IE09S034) is being tested for commercial production in China and has the potential to be commercialized
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